Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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December 29, 2006
At the Guardian's blog, Julie Bindel, a founding member of the feminist law reform campaign Justice for Women, writes an Op-Ed style post arguing against the legalization of prostitution, an issue she believes has been revived in the wake of England's recent murders in and around Ipswich, in the county of Suffolk.
Bindel writes, "Tolerance zones in the Netherlands, hailed as a great success, are closing down one by one, because they have proved a disaster, with criminality and abuse still prevalent." She thinks regulation hasn't made for safer conditions and has increased demand. Fair enough if that's accurate, but Bindel glides by some possible objections to her argument. She says:
Moves to unionise and regularise women in prostitution - to ensure "workers' rights" - are ludicrous, considering the following: most women do not want to be registered as "sex workers" as this can further stigmatise them by creating a permanent record of their prostitution; and what pimp would feel happy about paying taxes?
Catchy last clause, but I'm not sure she's right about the first point. Perhaps women would rather not be on record as hookers, but I would think that enough union-style protections such as wage guarantees and other rights would tip the balance. Their principal concerns, I would guess, are safety and protection from financial and other forms of abuse. If the law could offer those, the incentive would be powerful.
Whether union prostitutes would then be undercut by illegal competition is another matter, and it's difficult to speculate. But men might be drawn to sex workers who are tested for disease monthly, as pro-legalizers advocate.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:23 PM
December 29, 2006
Evan, in your last post you left out the juiciest bit of that New Republic item! Richard Stern, the emeritus professor of literature at Chicago, writes that Epstein, "as Myron J. Epstein, was a mediocre student of mine more than four decades ago."
After bashing Epstein's trite article (although he says he likes much of Epstein's other work), Stern says his "records show" that he gave Epstein a B-minus in the course. No specifics, but Stern implies the young man's work lacked even "a tithe of excitement."
"I suspect I would grade most of his recent work much higher," he concludes, "but this piece on belief isn't even worth a C."
I guess there's no reason why it should be surprising, or funny, that Epstein, who is so self-consciously tweedy and literary -- when I read him, I always feel I should be sitting in a leather chair in a mahogany-lined room at a men's club, chuckling in a self-satisfied way -- should have a B-minus in an English course lurking in his background. (Not to mention a professor who feels strongly enough to out him as mediocre a half-century after the fact.) Still, it is .
I suspect Stern knows that this is precisely the kind of comment that would bug Epstein.
What's next? Anne Fadiman's freshman comp professor steps forward to say he thought her work was too precious, and he failed her?
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:19 PM
December 29, 2006
At The New Republic's Open University blog, Richard Stern, a professor emeritus in English Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago and a fiction writer, links to and discusses "an exceptionally shallow and foolish piece" (unusual move) by Joseph Epstein in The Weekly Standard, for whom Epstein is a contributing editor. The Weekly Standard piece says President George W. Bush is likely to essentially "stay the course" in Iraq because he is "a believer" -- by which Epstein means both a man who got religion when he turned 40 and a man who got political religion on Sep. 11, 2001.
Interesting point, and hard to argue with. So far so good, I'd say, despite Stern's judgment. But then we get the statement that Bill Clinton fell into the camp of US presidents who were not believers but "something else -- managers, politicians, operators, men who just wanted the job. While in office, Bill Clinton ... seems to have had as little true belief as any politician in recent decades." Leaving political bias aside, that's highly debatable. Many Republicans would agree that Clinton was driven by the convictions he grew up with, and they were pretty consistent, if often centrist. (He was also driven by a libido that was both consistent and consistently costly.) And anyone who saw the interviews and pained pictures of Clinton when he signed the bill that "ended welfare as we know it" would posit that he was racked by uncertainty but also acting boldly, not following polls.
Epstein's article proceeds to rather boringly catalog the recent presidents who were believers and unbelievers, concluding with the statement that all great presidents were believers -- which is almost a tautology given the broad way he's defined the category.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:13 PM
December 29, 2006
Marginal Revolution is a wide-ranging blog written by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, who are both affiliated with George Mason University's James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy -- though the blog strays from politics and econ, as a recent post suggests. Cowen brings to our attention Ron Rosenbaum's most recent book, "The Shakespeare Wars," and cites the author's contention that there's more great Shakespeare available on DVD, tape, or film than could be seen by a viewer in years and years of theater-going.
He cites the following list of most worthy purchases:
1. Orson Welles, Chimes at Midnight [TC: also Welles's best movie]
2. Peter Brook, King Lear
3. Richard III, with Laurence Olivier
4. Hamlet, with Richard Burton
Cowen adds his view that "Chimes at Midnight" is also Welles's best film (really?), and wants to add Welles's Othello, and (gasp) Baz Luhrmann's "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet," a gangland weirdly dystopic number starring our dear Leo DiCaprio.
This is a fun game. I wouldn't pretend to a comprehensive viewpoint here -- the list is too long -- but I remember great affection for Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" and "Much Ado About Nothing" and enormous distaste for the 1995 "Othello" that starred Branagh, Laurence Fishburne, and, alas, one of my all-time favorites, Irene Jacob.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:54 PM
December 28, 2006
Another decidedly cool twist on the James Brown obit parade: At Dial "M" for Musicology, a pretty awesome dissection of the music of James Brown, with special consideration for "why JB's music is so goddam funky" -- a project suggested by Scott McLemee at Crooked Timber, who does his own amateur deconstruction. But here's Phil Ford from Dial "M":
Right now I'm thinking about the opening vamp of "Hot Pants," with its octave-jump bassline and its up-tilted three-note** guitar riff against a chicken-scratch rhythm guitar and a tambourine doing steady eighth-notes. (All led off by JB shouting ONE TWO ONE TWO THREE UHHNN.)
Some funky ingredients here, but what really funks me up is the way each part has its own decided placement in relationship to the beat.
Yes, there's more, including a thought on the Heisenbergian nature of hip.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 07:18 PM
December 28, 2006
The new London Review of Books includes a review by the left-wing writer Tariq Ali of Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf's new memoir, "In the Line of Fire." This is the book, I would add, whose attendant contract was cited by Musharraf during a press conference following a recent state visit with Bush as the reason he couldn't go any further into details of his past conversations with members of the Bush Administration. Musharraf stated at the time that Richard Armitage had threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if Musharraf didn't comply with the US's antiterrorism plans for the region. It seems that that turns out to be, naturally, the juiciest bit he offers, though there does seem to be some more score-settling in the book, most of it internal to Pakistan.
Ali's review is most valuable as a compact primer on the last few decades of political history in Pakistan -- a rambunctious period marked by an unsteady mix of civilian and military leadership. This mix led, for instance, to Musharraf's assuming power aboard an airplane intentionally kept airborne despite fuel concerns while another leader in line for the presidency, then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, was arrested.
Ali slips in a mention of the fact that he was in college in Lahore with senior General Ali Kuli Khan, who was considered for high office, and he writes with a corresponding personal authority on the region. According to him, "'In the Line of Fire' gives the official version of what has been happening in Pakistan over the last six years and is intended largely for Western eyes. Where Altaf Gauhar injected nonsense of every sort into Ayub’s memoirs, his son Humayun Gauhar, who edited this book, has avoided the more obvious pitfalls." Nevertheless, Ali notes a fact I didn't know -- that the book has been created by widespread and vocal dissent in the media, which Musharraf admirably tolerates. Crucial clues to his fate, this worthy review suggests, probably can be found in the autobiography.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:00 PM
December 28, 2006
Foreign Policy notes 10 developments that didn't get enough attention in 2006.
The eye-catching ones include No. 9: "What's Worse than Bird Flu? The Cure." The dreaded bird flu mostly failed to materialize in 2006 (no humans died from it), but Tamiflu, the medicine used (sometimes prophylactically) to counter the disease, killed 10 Canadians and, during a 10-month period, injured 100 Americans -- or caused them to hallucinate, frightening them badly.
And No. 4: "Russia Fuels Latin American Arms Race." Off the radar screen of most American observers was the $300 million purchase of Russian arms by Brazil and the $1 billion purchase of jets and helicopters by Venezuela. Good thing we have such a superb relationship with Venezuela; otherwise there might be cause for concern.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:45 PM
December 28, 2006
Yesterday brought the news that a civil suit brought by a former IRS attorney and current law professor at University of Arkansas-Little Rock against Jessica Cutler, the writer behind the sex-on-the-Hill blog Washingtonienne, is headed to trial. Robert Steinbuch is suing Cutler for $20 million for chronicling in great detail the sexual relationship between them when she was a young D.C. staffer for Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio. (After the hugely popular Washington gossip blog Wonkette linked to Washingtonienne, the story went national and Cutler was fired from her job ... but got a book deal.)
At The Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh points out the unusual nature of the case: it is "a 'civil action for invasion of privacy for public revelation of private facts,' not a defamation claim." Volokh adds, "Nothing in this lawsuit will 'restore [Steinbuch's] good name,'" which I would call beyond dispute, adding that the extra publicity won't help at all in that department. It will be interesting to see, too, if Steinbuch's argument, which seems to butt up against the First Amendment, can gain any traction. A victory of any kind for him would be a serious threat to prurient, revelatory bloggers everywhere, not that we need more of them.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:34 AM
December 27, 2006
At the Economist blog Free Exchange, a post picks up on a short piece by Mark Kleiman on the blog The Reality-Based Community about the pricing of hard drugs. Kleiman disputes what he feels is the alarmist tone of an LA Times article about price drops in heroin but is stunned (as I was) by the raw facts:
[G]rams of highly pure Afghan heroin are now trading at $90 in LA. That's about a dime per pure milligram, compared with $2.50 a pure milligram in New York during the "French Connection" days. For a naive user, 5mg of heroin is a hefty dose, so your first heroin experience is now available for less than the price of a candy bar.
Ain't competition grand?
However, Kleiman also points out the more encouraging fact that heroin is often "price insensitive": "The good news is that the collapse from $2.50 to 50 cents seems to have had only a fairly modest impact on the number of new heroin users; that, like the price collapse itself, is not what I would have predicted based on simple microeconomics."
In a footnote, Kleiman advances his most interesting thesis: "Heroin, even more than cocaine, illustrates the near-futility of trying to use drug law enforcement to control drug abuse once a drug has found a mass market," to which Kleiman adds the supporting fact that increased convictions have had little effect on abuse. The Economist blogger, picking up a similar theme, suggests that "America could legalise drugs and reap the benefits of lower imprisonment and less drug-associated crime, without seeing much of an increase in drug use." An old saw of the legalization movement, but perhaps new facts make it due for a revival.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:48 PM
December 27, 2006
A nice twist on the usual boilerplate of obituaries this week: as a way of remembering R&B/funk/rock/soul legend James Brown, prominent Ghanaian journalist Cameron Duodu, at the Guardian's Comment Is Free, writes a reminder of Brown's effect on Ghanaian politics in the crucial post-independence decade. After a formative experience of discrimination at a Howard Johnson's in the US in 1957, one of Ghana's foremost politicians of the past, Komla Gbedemah, alerted the press, and was soon invited to the White House by Dwight Eisenhower. It was a step in his rise to power in his own country.
When he created his own political party called the National Alliance of Liberals, he alluded to James Brown to craft its slogan: "Say it loud! I'm black and I'm proud!" It was a reference to Brown's song "Sat It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)." And it was enormously successful. Duodu says that Ghanaians of a certain age still remember the call-and-response slogan from '60s rallies, even though Gbedemah didn't end up winning a national election.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:24 PM
December 27, 2006
After yesterday's encouragement to donate to memorialize the victims in Darfur, I wanted to highlight a piece of good news from the deeply embattled and poor region of Sudan. Yesterday Sudan's President, Omar al-Bashir, at long last accepted a UN plan to increase the presence of international peacekeepers in Darfur. He also said he was "ready to discuss" a cease-fire.
Bashir had rejected a plan for a 20,000-man UN force in August, and the plan he's accepted is greatly scaled down from that one, although the final numbers have been left vague so far. It begins with UN support staff joining the currently stationed (and outgunned) African Union troops, then provides for a UN military presence and the use of UN military "assets." If Bashir doesn't retreat from this pledge, as he has before, this is good news for the weak and victimized of Darfur, who have been waiting for help for too long.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:02 PM
December 26, 2006
At Crooked Timber, where academic concerns nicely ripple out into society, John Quiggin, a social democrat from Down Under, takes up the matter of whether what Matt Yglesias calls the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics -- the idea that wars are won by willpower -- is in fact true, from a historical perspective. Quiggin points out that any war can be made to fit into this model, because "whenever a nation loses a war, it can be argued that, with more willpower it would have prevailed" (unless the nation was destroyed or otherwise irreparably damaged).
Quiggin also argues that in the Iraq war, the Administration continues to act as if it believes in the Green Lantern, hoping to avoid the example of Vietnam, in which, according to one school of thought, the US's loss of will as a population spelled the end. He says that whether there is enough will or not, the conflict in Iraq has proven that the US is unquestionably the great military power, even an unbeatable power, but that its ability to handle insurgencies and to secure a lasting peace or some other amorphous goal has been thrown into deep question:
So, the US has a unique capacity to enforce the global law that makes wars of aggression a crime against humanity. In the context of civil conflicts like those in Bosnia and Kosovo, US intervention can nullify the advantage possessed by the side that has a conventional army at its disposal. But this military power is useful only if there exists a widely-accepted political solution waiting to be implemented.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:26 PM
December 26, 2006
As you make plans to make those last-minute, tax-deductible donations to charities and other non-profits, don't forget to consider Darfur, which remains an immense tragedy, and remains indeed a growing and increasingly complex catastrophe. The situation in Sudan (of which Darfur constitutes a section) has been unstable for years -- decades, by some measure. And its conflicts often spill over into neighboring countries, e.g. Chad, Central African Republic, and Zaire. That's happening now, as the refugee crisis escalates in Chad and the warring janjaweed cross the border illegally to make raids on helpless rural nomads, for little to no profit.
One organization, the Darfur Wall, is honoring the victims of the killing and unrest there, who now number approximately 400,000, roughly half the victim count in Rwanda in 1994. Donations of a dollar or more (no excuses there) light up a number on the virtual wall, in honor of that victim. Click here to explore and donate.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:37 PM
December 26, 2006
For the bibliophiles among us, the (London) Times Literary Supplement updates one page on their site daily-- and, from what I can tell, only one page. The TLS Table provides a list, divided into broad categories like "History" and "Politics," of some of the book that have arrived that day that the offices of the TLS. No annotation, no publication information, no synopsis -- just a list of some books. Nevertheless, the Table can be a fun cross-section of what's cooking in publishing, at least in the UK.
I ought to have maintained a similar page when I worked at the New York Review of Books, but the flow was almost too heavy to reach your hand in -- sometimes over a hundred books in a day. It was my job (among other roles) to sort through these titles and separate the wheat from the chaff. While doing so, though, it was interesting to get a wide-gauge look at what people are interested in. A little like those pages that tell you what words people are entering into search engines right now.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:52 AM
December 22, 2006
The wonderful stylist and interesting social theorist Martin Amis has a new novel out in England, soon to be released here: "House of Meetings." In it, according to a fierce but finely observed review by Daniel Soar in the London Review of Books, he does a kind of short novelization of his nonfiction book "Koba the Dread" -- Soar, being a bit fresh, calls it "a 'non-fiction' book" -- about the crimes committed under Stalin and Communism.
We're never clear, reading Soar, on where exactly the novel takes us, but Soar is dogged about pursuing Amis's mind, not only in this story but in his whole oeuvre. Of most concern to him, as to many former fans of his and Christopher Hitchens', is Amis's recent rhetorical war on Islamism, which Soar suggests is the metaphorical raison d'etre of this novel about Stalinism. Soar reproduces some of Amis's words about Islam and Islamism in a recent interview. For those unaware of these statements, it's worth reading the whole piece. Here they are, in part:
There’s a definite urge -- don’t you have it? -- to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation -- further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:02 PM
December 22, 2006
Josh has "Philosophy Watch" -- now, alas, on hiatus -- while Private Eye has its "Pseud's Corner." While I ponder my own rubric (not really), I'll just pass along this gem from Slate's year-end wrap-up of pop music.
The subject is two CDs, by Destroyer and Swan Lake, featuring the work of the songwriter Dan Bejar, that I'd actually like to hear (though not necessarily because of this particular endorsement).
Both albums, but Destroyer's "Rubies" especially, are like particle accelerators, bombarding their subjects (from romantic nostalgia to the status hierarchies of contemporary art) at every turn with polymorphous rhetoric, while never settling into a single point of view.
That, and there are some good -- I mean "casually indelible" -- "riffs and melodies," too.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:15 AM
December 22, 2006
Phil Baker, whose work I don't know, has a very nice essay-review in the new (London) Times Literary Supplement on a book about things that have disappeared in London: Iain Sinclair's "London: City of Disappearances." Great topic.
Cities are about death and rebirth, appearance and disappearance. They're works of art that remake themselves before our eyes -- often, at least to the misty-eyed observer, with disastrous results. In New York we're in the midst of losing three of the once-great bookstores (old story), and the Tower Records branches of course. That's just retail. Restaurants have a shelf life of about six months.
And I remember a Boston from my youth, particularly the grubby bits near Downtown Crossing and Fenway Park, that is no longer there for me when I return. Now we have new buildings to build memories around, and to be sad about when they're gone.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:33 AM
December 21, 2006
Verrry interesting news from the Washington Note via the folks at Talking Points Memo (the TPM Muckraker site, to be more specific), who have been known to break stories themselves: the New York Times is set to publish tomorrow an Op-Ed I blogged about earlier this week that was declared classified by the White House, with the CIA as intermediary. The Times will black out text that has been redacted by the government, but the paper, in what I would think is an unprecedented, Web-era move, will direct readers to other public sources that provide the so-called classified material -- for instance the longer paper the author, Flynt Leverett, published on the site of the Century Foundation in early Dec., from which the Op-Ed was derived.
A gutsy move by the Times, though obviously perfectly legal. And an interesting test for the government's hotter heads when it comes to Iran. Will they return fire?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:45 PM
December 21, 2006
Adam Bellow, a son of the venerated Chicago novelist nonpareil Saul Bellow, was one of my predecessors as an assistant editor at The New Leader -- his first job in publishing, I believe (and mine). He's been in the game ever since. His newest venture deserves a careful and watchful eye. He is bringing back pamphlet publishing with an outfit called The New Pamphleteers. Why should writers be bound to either 1,000 word essays -- maybe 5,000 if they are lucky enough to be in, say, the London Review -- or 50,000 word books (if not longer)? Surely there's a middle ground -- and an audience for it, when people are telling the publishing industry in myriad ways that whether it disapproves or not, they don't have the time for big books. Why not emulate the Revolutionary War intellectual Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," a concise pamphlet and still one of the most widely read political works of all time?
Bellow, in the words of a Columbia Journalism Review writer who interviewed him, "believes the Internet has become the central arena for intellectual debate in America [and how!--Ed.], and it is from this source -- reprinting digests of blog posts or letting individual bloggers pull together collections of their writing -- that he hopes to harvest most of his material." An intriguing next step for publishing, though we might counter that there's still a big place for print. Nevertheless, Bellow's enthusiasm comes through, and he's got a point:
What I am describing as the blogosphere is basically a Wild West situation, an oil boom, a gold rush. From the perspective of the traditional publishing company there is something to tap into, but not much of an understanding of how. What they are typically doing is applying the old familiar paradigm, the horse-and-buggy paradigm, bloggers should be writing books. Well, of course many bloggers do write books. But that is a different matter. That's turning them into a different animal.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:05 PM
December 21, 2006
I love this end-of-the-year reading list about American politics -- and not because I endorse the specific choices (though they seem sound). First, John Judis, of the Brookings Institution and the New Republic, admits that whenever he's asked for his picks for "best books of the year" (which is often), he must decline. "I don't read enough current books to offer an educated opinion," he writes. (I often wonder who honestly does, aside from full-time book critics.)
The list is the opposite of trendy -- how much cocktail-party mileage can you get out of "Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916," by Martin J. Sklar? -- and you get a good sense of one man's intellectual landmarks.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 02:49 PM
December 21, 2006
I posted a retraction, yesterday, correcting a recent Brainiac post of mine in which I'd too hastily described Habermas, Arendt, Berlin, and Popper as "the heroes of American neocons," a characterization that is somewhere between imprecise and incorrect, as Danny Postel pointed out to me.
Now a mutual acquaintance of ours, Scott McLemee, who writes the Intellectual Affairs column for Inside Higher Ed, and who has been mentioned more than once on Brainiac, emails to voice his support for Postel's argument. (NB: When we launched Ideas in September of 2002, if memory serves, McLemee and Postel were still colleagues at the Chronicle of Higher Ed.)
Among other things, McLemee has this to say about my misstatement:
One problem is that the term "neoconservative" now has very little historical specificity. Almost nobody going by the label now ever had any relationship at all to [Partisan Review] -- and the oft-repeated claim that neocon foreign policy is somehow related to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution is a matter of high-sounding but pluperfect ignorance. (I have yet to meet anyone making this claim who had any idea whatsoever what that theory was.)
That's good material, but his next graf is even better:
The belief that the faction now known as the neoconservatives has some deep continuity with the old New York intellectual left has become a kind of urban legend. For every Gertrude Himmelfarb who spent a little while in the Young People's Socialist League (Fourth International), there are two dozen guys like a certain third-tier neocon functionary I met here in Washington a few years ago who turned one visit to the meeting of a very mildly reformist campus organization into a marketable story about My Disillusionment With the Far Left.
There's a novel of ideas in here somewhere, don't you think?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:06 PM
December 21, 2006
I don't know, Josh (and Ty), but I think I'd need to hear a much richer argument than that L.A. Times piece provides before I conclude that one can "connect the dots" between "Casino Royale" and Abu Ghraib. Or even between "Casino Royale" and "Saw III."
Think about how far this argument carries. "Casino Royale" features a scene in which a cartoon villain tortures a cartoon hero, who everyone knows will triumph (such are the conventions of the genre). Are all such scenes in pop art now aesthetically and politically suspect, enablers of John Yoo's preferred methods of interrogation? (The laser beam heading toward the hero's genitals in "Goldfinger"? Baddies tormenting Indiana Jones or Han Solo?) What would genre fiction and film look like, shorn of all such scenes?
Isn't it usually lefty cultural critics who defend (some of) this stuff against the charge it is degrading and morally corrosive? How does Hamrah distinguish his argument from those arguments?
I am appalled by modern "torture porn," but I don't think the entire Grand Guignol genre -- "The Pit and the Pendulum"? "Halloween?"-- can be quite so easily written off as political retrograde. But I'd love to read a longer, deeper piece by Hamrah on these issues.
(I much prefer the way James Wolcott handles the issue of violence, sexual abuse, and degradation in TV cop and forensics procedurals, here and here: He tries to identify the line at which a genre he himself enjoys crosses over into something darker. Partly because they are so mainstream, these shows often make my jaw drop more than "Turista" does.)
Posted by Christopher Shea at 12:11 PM
December 21, 2006
Potentially lost in the shuffle of Bush's two rounds of rare public comment on Iraq in the last 72 hours, Bush lent support yesterday -- with a string attached -- to a key element of the Democratic congress' plan of action on the home front. He gave his first clear public endorsement of a program to raise the minimum wage by $2.10 over the next two years, a significant hike in percentage terms from $5.15 to $7.25 -- not a favorite move of the GOP, generally speaking.
Perhaps this was a simple acknowledgment that his low approval rating probably wouldn't withstand a veto of such a measure early next year, but nevertheless it's interesting. If nothing else, it's probably a sign that Bush is ready or forced to swallow a bitter pill or two at this point. It's worth noting, though, that Bush's caveat is not insignificant. He wants the wage hike attached to specific small-business tax breaks so that those businesses hurt by the hike have the means to recover their losses. Sounds reasonable as a compromise, but it was enough to make Sen. Kennedy, for one, grumble about obstacles.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:37 AM
December 21, 2006
Sven Birkerts wrote a fine article in Sunday's Globe Ideas section about the task and psychology of reviewing a pre-hyped book, in his case "Sacred Games," by Indian novelist Vikram Chandra, due out here in January. Birkerts writes of flipping through the "advance reader's copy" and snapping to attention upon seeing that the publisher planned a $300,000 marketing budget. That's a lot of dough by any standard, he thinks, quite rightly. Suddenly his perception of the book is changed -- and he hasn't started reading!
I had this very experience once, when I wrote a review of a novel whose debut author had received a $1.4 million advance. (I'll never forget that figure.) As it happens, he was also Indian, Hari Kunzru, and had written a sprawling epic, "The Illusionist." It was difficult to write that review, my first ever for a serious publication, without letting what are called off-the-page considerations creep in. A lot of soul-searching occurred, having little effect on the review I hope, but certainly standing in the way of writing it. I had to smile and nod at this bit of Birkerts's:
I had weighed Western civilization in the balance and found it wanting. Now I lay down on the couch, set a pillow on my stomach -- the novel really is that big -- and actually opened the cover....
Posted by Evan Hughes at 08:53 AM
December 21, 2006
Globe film critic Ty Burr posted to the Movie Nation blog yesterday about sometime Ideas contributor A.S. Hamrah's recent LA Times op-ed. Here's Ty on Hamrah:
The writer A.S. Hamrah had a brilliant piece in yesterday's L.A. Times on why we like torture movies so much. An absolute must-read for fans of the New Horror and "Casino Royale," and Hamrah correctly connects the dots to Abu Ghraib and points out that Mel Gibson is being pilloried for the sins of others. I have yet to hear a defense of Torture Porn movies that goes beyond "Uh, I just like them." The question still hangs there: Why do you like them?
Hamrah's most recent essay for Ideas was about a fellow Brooklynite, the cartoonist Mark Newgarden. Earlier this year, he demonstrated his encylopedic knowledge of movies and deep insight into what makes us tick by writing about fat suit chic for Reason magazine.
He and I are old friends, so take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt (if you must): Hamrah is America's Barthes or Baudrillard, a sociocultural critic extraordinaire. You heard it here first!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:12 AM
December 20, 2006
Last Thursday, in a Brainiac post about Danny Postel's excellent pamphlet on the situation in Iran, the American anti-imperial left, and the future of American liberalism, I described Habermas, Arendt, Berlin, and Popper as "the heroes of American neocons." Postel and I exchanged emails about this line, and though I meant to post an excerpt from our dialogue that same day, alas, events overtook me and I'm doing it a week later...
Postel wrote to me as follows:
Nothing could be further from the truth! Habermas in particular [and Postel should know] is anathema to the neocons! He was *adamantly* against not only the Iraq war, but famously wrote a widely-discussed statement on the future of Europe (co-signed with Derrida) which directly defines the European vision AGAINST the neocon agenda, against US unilateralism and hegemony. Habermas is NEVER cited by neocon thinkers as a hero -- go through the pages of the Weekly Standard, Commentary, and the like and you'll find the
opposite: they regard him as a European socialist who champions the UN
and is guilty of anti-Americanism.
I concede the point about Habermas; my mistake. I replied, however, that whether or not Arendt and Popper and Berlin are cited in neocon journals today, these liberal thinkers were influential on those New York Intellectuals who cut their teeth writing for Partisan Review and other leftist journals but later shamefacedly renounced their leftism.
Postel agreed with me that Popper was -- and remains -- an intellectual hero to the neocons. But regarding Arendt and Berlin, he refused to back down:
Arendt and Berlin were influential on the Cold War liberals around Partisan Review who had renounced their Marxism, *some* of whom eventually *became* neocons but *most* of whom simply remained Cold War liberals.... The ones who *did * become neocons tended to be louder and more visible and better funded -- and they took over the publication of Partisan Review itself (though it was moribund for decades) -- and so created the impression that they were what had become of Cold War liberalism, whereas in reality they were but one faction of what had become of it.
It's been too long since I read up on my Cold War intellectual history, but Postel sounds like he knows what he's talking about. I surrender! Drop me an email if you have a strong opinion on this.
UPDATE: Scott McLemee weighs in on all this.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 05:11 PM
December 20, 2006
Those reading this blog, and most people not reading this blog, are only too aware of Wikipedia, the reader-edited not-for-profit online encyclopedia. Those shocked that Wikipedia, like the ubiquitous classifieds billboard Craigslist, has not yet been monetized through advertising, now at least have the relief of seeing that Wikipedia has launched a fundraising campaign, aided by its nonprofit (read tax-deductible) status. According to the fundraising plea, it's one of the top ten sites in the world -- not that surprising when you take note of how often a Wikipedia entry is in the top five results of a Google search.
But did you know that under the Wiki Foundation's umbrella is also Wikiquote, where you can track down or discover thousands if not millions of notable quotes? Great idea, though again reliability is, I would think, a major issue, especially when it comes to spoken words. But what else is new?
An interesting category on the Wikiquote page: famous misquotations. I blogged about common misquotes a few months back, but I knew nothing of this gold mine! (Prepare to be slightly depressed upon being disabused of some favorites.)
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:39 AM
December 20, 2006
If you are interested in Drake Bennett's piece for Ideas this past weekend, on giving the gift of carbon neutrality, you should also be interested not only in the shopper's guide that runs online alongside his article, but also in the posts to the discussion forum Drake gave rise to. It's worth noting that the overall flavor of the discussion is pretty snide and defeatist about any attempts to reduce carbon emissions, particularly through gifts, but one reader posed an interesting question, albeit with a negative undertone:
I wonder how the cost of emissions in flying a plane cross-country is figured. I suppose the most frenzied environmentalist in the room assigns a unit cost to CO2 and to methane and so on, then figures how much of each is emitted during the flight, multiplies the amounts by the unit costs and adds up the results for a total cost. (The article doesn't provide any clue as to how it's done.)
I'm not a scientist, but I would guess that Expedia and Travelocity's carbon-offset charge of $16.99 might in fact represent a low-ball estimate, rather than the work of "the most frenzied environmentalist." Have a look at climatecrisis.net, the Web site of the Al Gore film, "An Inconvenient Truth." If you click on "Calculate your personal impact" and enter the number of flights you took in a given year -- even, say, three round trips -- you'll be amazed as to how much your carbon report card plummets. Due to the massive amounts of fuel burnt by a commercial jet in a given flight, each passenger is responsible for more carbon output than if she drove the same distance. That's based on numbers, not environmentalist propaganda.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:39 AM
December 19, 2006
Maybe using nouns as verbs "weirds language," as "Calvin & Hobbes" famously observed, but according to a new report from the University of Liverpool, it also limbers up the little gray cells - at least when it's Shakespeare who does the verbing.
"Bard boosts brain," "Shakespeare excites brain," and, most implausibly, "Shakespeare used advanced brain theories" say the various headlines on the story, which claims that brain imaging shows how Shakespeare's inventive language stimulates mental activity.
Philip Davis, professor of English at Liverpool, explains:
"It works in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don’t appear to fit, when we know they should, the brain becomes excited.
"Research has shown that there are parts of the brain that are responsible for the processing of nouns and others for the processing of verbs. . . . If you throw something in that looks like a noun, but is used as a verb, a new level of consciousness might have to be created as they talk to each other.
"For example, Shakespeare uses the phrase, 'he godded me' in the tragedy 'Coriolanus.' Godded looks like a noun, but is a verb and the brain is confused by the anomaly."
Confused in a good way, Davis is certain: "One of the things that makes us dull is simply going back over established pathways."
But wait, there's more:
The research could help stave off old age, claim the researchers, who are conducting more experiments to identify the precise regions of the brains that are involved.
"All's well that ends well," indeed. It's not clear, though, whether verbing nouns is supposed to be good medicine only in great literature, or wherever it turns up. Reading Shakespeare sounds like a fine prescription for mental longevity. But if officing, incentivizing, and solutioning are the brain boosters on offer, some people might prefer oblivion.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 10:15 PM
December 19, 2006
Flynt Leverett, a fellow at the centrist New America Foundation, gave a talk in Washington last week at the Center for American Progress. It was a speech laying out America's diplomatic alternatives for dealing with Iran. Important, but hardly earth-shaking stuff. But in the talk Leverett revealed that before sending an Op-Ed to the New York Times that week he had submitted the article to the CIA for clearance -- a standard procedure for him because he served on President Bush's National Security Council, and a procedure that had always gone through without a hitch.
This time, though, the CIA forwarded the Op-Ed to the White House, which promptly quashed it. Leverett: "I have been extremely pessimistic that this administration is inclined or capable of genuinely rethinking its approach to Iran in the way that we need it to at this point,and [this] has only confirmed that for me."
The irony of it all is that the Op-ed was merely an 800-word condensation, with nothing new added, of a report he already wrote, drawing on his significant Iran experience, for the Century Foundation (home to Ideas contributor Patrick Keefe, who tipped off Brainiac). It would seem that the Century Foundation has published classified information -- only the CIA didn't think so when it approved that very report earlier this month. I can't think of another episode that has demonstrated that either the process of classification is tremendously flawed and silly or the government is using it arbitrarily and even politically. Or both.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:30 PM
December 19, 2006
In an unusually long and thought-provoking post at The Valve, Joseph Kugelmass, a U. Cal grad student and a prolific blogger of cultural criticism, delivers a critique of the ways in which Nabokov's "Lolita" is read, both in Tehran and everywhere else.
Kugelmass believes we've been led astray by Nabokov's statement, perhaps intentionally misleading, he feels, that "Lolita" is "the record of my love affair with the English language." (We're even more misled by that ubiquitous John Updike quote about Nabokov writing "ecstatically.") "Lolita" isn't really about language, Kugelmass protests. It's about the enormous and enormously complex consuming power of love, however forbidden. In the works of "Lolita" critisicm, he says, "one finds, instead of these elements, a series of moralizing accounts of the novel, most of which are both convincing and anaesthetizing."
He moves from there into a discussion of what it means to disagree about works of art, as he disagrees with many about "Lolita" and others (like the Web site Pitchfork) about music. He wants to conserve disagreement as a fruitful and compelling habit, not to let conflict devolve into agreeing to disagree, as the saying goes: "It is good to be provoked." A wandering essay, but in the end strangely persuasive.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:49 PM
December 19, 2006
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve's law school and a contributing editor to the conservative National Review Online, picks up on a Wall Street Journal editorial [$] comparing carbon emissions in the US and the EU.
It appears that though the EU had the edge in reducing emissions, or at least curbing emissions increases, in the late 1990s, Europe has fallen behind the US since 2000, in part by abandoning cleaner energy sources like nuclear power for coal and other carbon-based fuels "for other environmental reasons." Like what, I wonder?
Anyhow, this is a rebuke to those who thought that the American refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocols was the death knell of US environmentalism, or at least put us far behind other industrialized nations in reducing our environmental footprint. Not so, if the Journal is to be believed.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:11 PM
December 18, 2006
As noted in the New York Times, a blog of the tech magazine Wired has recorded an unhappy milestone: 100 million personal records lost or opened to prying eyes since the notorious ChoicePoint breach of two years ago. That's a lot in two years. And according to attrition.org, the number since 2000 is around 136 million. Assuming no overlap, that number is equivalent to more than a third of this country's population, and most of these records do involve Americans. (One shudders to think about data security in the third world.)
This is another reason, as if one needed one, to limit the collection of personal data by corporations and government agencies. Telemarketing is a popular reason, as is state spying. Add this to the list: your social security number could get lost or stolen, as it was for some 382,000 employees present and past of the aerospace giant Boeing. At UCLA, a database containing SS #s was being hacked for a year before anyone noticed. (Educational institutions tend to have the weakest data protection.) So think twice, perhaps, while online shopping.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:32 PM
December 18, 2006
n+1 has been carrying, for a few weeks, an interesting ongoing debate about Walter Benn Michaels' "The Trouble with Diversity," clearly one of the hottest academic crossover books of the season. (Chris Shea covered the book thoroughly back in September, both in Ideas and on Brainiac, e.g. here. )WBM himself has been involved in the back-and-forth on n+1, following a very critical review by Bruce Robbins.
For the moment, WBM's letter is reproduced at the bottom of the n+1 home page, with Robbins' reply at the top. It's an interesting exchange, but I feel that WBM, despite not having the last word, is having the last victory here. Robbins seems to me to be setting up a straw man. After WBM argues that addressing racism would do nothing to address economic equality because then "we'd just have more poor whites and Asians" -- a vulnerable claim, I'd agree -- Robbins says WBM has fallen into a trap of thinking that society represents some kind of zero-sum game. Why should black misfortune affect anyone else's fortunes?
But as WBM has already made clear, the reason he thinks so is that that's the way capitalism works: "it’s capitalism not racism that produces economic inequality (racism is just a selection mechanism)." The floors still have to get cleaned after black boats have risen on the latest tide. Robbins tries to say that WBM is secretly -- or by some logical necessity -- despairing about all attempts at justice: "Given his assumptions, Michaels cannot really expect any more from the trade unions whose weakness he claims to bemoan than from the feminism he mocks. For he has to assume that any gains the unions might wrench from the corporations would be instantly confiscated from other employees elsewhere." But no. Because union strength would represent a direct and, for WBM, welcome, assault on capitalism. It would mean attacking inequality directly, and that's just what WBM wants to do.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:59 AM
December 18, 2006
There have been some recent attempts to revive the reputation of tiny Kazakhstan, the object of some brutal humor in the movie "Borat," starring the man of the cultural moment, Sacha Baron Cohen. In one, the government halted its anti-"Borat" crusade and abruptly shifted course, as if to boast of its newfound sense of humor: "'This film was created by a comedian so let's laugh at it, that's my attitude,' a smiling [Kazakh] President Nursultan Nazarbayev told reporters at a joint news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair." Too little too late?
The latest news isn't exactly resonating in Kazakhstan's favor, though. The country has launched a campaign to switch to iodine salt, which has a record of discouraging disease. No problem there, but the PR campaign has had a ring of the old Eastern bloc:
One female volunteer went to a bus company and rerecorded its “next-stop” announcements interspersed with short plugs for iodized salt. “She had a very sexy voice, and men would tell the drivers to play it again,” Ms. Sivryukova said.
Even the former world chess champion Anatoly Karpov, who is a hero throughout the former Soviet Union for his years as champion, joined the fight. “Eat iodized salt,” he advised schoolchildren in a television appearance, “and you will grow up to be grandmasters like me.”
Mr. Karpov, in particular, handled hostile journalists adeptly, Mr. Zouev said, deflecting inquiries as to why he did not advocate letting people choose iodized or plain salt by comparing it to the right to have two taps in every home, one for clean water and one for dirty.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:14 AM
December 15, 2006
Former President Carter's new book about the Middle East has been attacked from many sides: Some find its criticism of Israeli policy offensive and even anti-Semitic. Meanwhile, a prominent Emory University professor and former director of the Carter Center has charged that Carter's version of certain high-level meetings is not to be trusted.
Pedants are pre-occupied with a different issue: Where's the colon?
The book's title -- not just on the cover, where designers can do what they want, but also on the formal title page -- is presented as "Palestine Peace not Apartheid." That's a pretty odd formulation. How does one read it aloud?
In the Globe, writers and editors insert the colon you expect to see: "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid." Ah, yes: order is restored to the universe.
However, in this scathing Washington Post review, and in this Post piece about the brouhaha surrounding the book, the editors went with President Carter's and Simon & Schuster's awkward version. (Curiously, the Post's Op-Ed editors made a different call in a Michael Kinsley column.)
The New York Times, too, is going with the awkward "Palestine Peace not Apartheid."
(I'm told the Post's internal message board was briefly lit up with heated debate over this vital issue. Finally, one wag made the point that obsessing about colons isn't exactly the way to win over those younger readers everyone's always talking about.)
Newspaper copy editors generally don't pay much heed to the sometimes-daft ways that outsiders choose to render their product names or titles. Otherwise, you'd have read stories about a TV show called "NUMB3RS." But evidently overruling a former President on a style point is a bit harder.
A beleaguered-sounding publicist at Simon & Schuster just returned my call, to confirm that, yes, omitting the colon was a conscious choice. Someone else took the message, so I didn't get a chance to ask why. I don't think I'll call back, as I suspect she has enough on her plate already.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:31 PM
December 15, 2006
The blogosphere is all abuzz with the latest news about ... blogs. BBC News:
The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner.
The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.
Gartner has also predicted, perhaps more interestingly, that Microsoft's Vista, appearing soon, will be the last version of Windows ever made. But back to blogs. Technorati, the blog search site, presents a picture that conflicts with Gartner's: they see blogs as an ever-growing phenomenon. In any case, it would seem to me that the trend-line worth paying attention to is whether blogs begin to improve in quality as they became embraced as an alternate form of legitimate media. Ahem.
But Frank Fisher, at the Guardian blog Comment Is Free, is already throwing blogging under the bus. The next big thing, he says, is "slife" -- that is, "slice of life" videos:
Not an after-the-fact, edited and considered diary, but a real-time feed of daily life, streaming from lapel cameras and mikes, via your phone or PDA's 3G connection, up to a web server and then to the world. "Who would watch that?" you cry. Are you kidding? Billions.
I'm pretty sure his tongue's in cheek, but this is actually a pretty perceptive extrapolation from the phenomenon of YouTube, which has surpassed blogging in buzz. Who thought anyone would watch other people's home movies?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:24 PM
December 15, 2006
New York City long ago went smoke-free; nothing doing for the man with a Marlboro in restaurants, bars, or in fact any indoor space I can think of. Now the European countries, of all places, are falling in line. Germany is among the latest to ban most indoor tobacco use, I believe.
But Ohio?! Yes, folks, it's gone there, too, after voters passed "Issue 5" in November. The uproar in the great football state has been something to behold, I'm told by multiple sources.
The freshest -- and funniest -- account comes from the excellent blogger Scott McLemee, writing at Crooked Timber. The humor begins with the title, "First They Came For the Snuff Dippers, and I Did Not Speak Out, For I Was Not a Snuff Dipper." McLemee quotes a truly astounding example of the time-honored genre of the hysterical, anti-government letter to the editor, this one from the Toledo Blade. Here's the quote:
In their quest to form a perfect world run by perfect people and rule over all others, corrupt little Nazi German people who could not control their own unhappy lives tried to control the lives others for their own good. But freedom-loving people rose up against them and restored freedom.... My main concern as I get older and near retirement is people will live longer and as Social Security fails, what will be the Smoke Nazis' final solution to that problem?
McLemee's rejoinder: "Gosh, you don't suppose they would enforce mandatory smoking for the elderly in order to kill them off? That would be evil. But also sort of appropriate, what with being Smoke Nazis and everything."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:39 PM
December 15, 2006
This buzz-creating paper, by an MIT engineer and an MIT business professor, is heavy-going [and a pdf] -- only academics and financial whizzes should bother downloading it -- but it suggests that we plebeians may soon be able to crash the hedge-fund party.
As readers of the business pages know, hedge funds these days are at the center of the financial world -- secretive, gigantic investment pools, open only to the wealthiest individuals and institutions.
But the MIT scholars, Jasmina Hasanhodzic and Andrew Lo, suggest that while some of the investment returns earned by these funds derives from the individual savvy of the managers, most comes more simply from their creative mixes of different investment instruments. In other words, the authors say, it may be possible to replicate the returns of hedge funds -- or come close, anyway -- through low-cost methods relying on copycat formulas.
Two implications: First, ordinary investors might eventually have access to funds earning larger returns than the mutual funds they now choose among. (Even some investors who could afford to buy into hedge funds, such as pension managers, shy from them because of their lack of transparency and liquidity. The clones would have more of both.) Second, managers of real hedge funds might have to lower their gargantuan fees, once word gets out that their investment strategies aren't as unique and mysterious as we thought.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:42 AM
December 15, 2006
This post is not meant to point out a well-turned article or an interesting argument advanced online. I just want to turn attention to a piece of news that didn't make the front page. It's meaningful news to many people: newly released data show that death sentences have declined dramatically in recent years, by as much as 60 percent since 1999.
Why? No one can be certain, but one quote seems to capture the prevailing theory:
"You could call this the DNA era," [Richard C. Dieter, who heads the Death Penalty Information Center,] said. "It’s been quite a phenomenon over the last eight years and has had a great impact in raising doubts about the reliability of verdicts."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:24 AM
December 14, 2006
Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie aside, American readers demand a particular vision of England in their English novels, Benjamin Markovits argues in this essay for the British magazine Prospect.
Is the fact that English writers keep giving us what we want -- lots of "public schools" (even in Harry Potter!), Oxbridge, and clever upper-middle-class banter, for example -- a sign of artistic bankruptcy, or of a robust tradition?
(Martin Amis thinks -- or thought -- the former, writing, in 1990: "In its current form, the typical English novel is 225 sanitised pages about the middle classes. You know, 'well-made' with the nice colour scheme and decor, and matching imagery.")
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:54 PM
December 14, 2006
Attention frustrated law students: Daniel J. Solove -- an associate professor at George Mason Law (do all those GMU people blog?) -- feels your pain.
Wow, this post feels like it was written by a student, don't you think? The system of grading exams, a widespread activity this time of year, is simple, says Solove. You toss the stack of exams down a staircase. Where the individual exams land -- well, that determines the curve! The only matter of debate is whether the exams that end up lower get lower grades or vice versa:
While many professors still practice the top-higher-grade approach, the leading authorities subscribe to the bottom-higher-grade theory, despite its counterintuitive appearance. The rationale for this view is that the exams that fall lower on the staircase have more heft and have traveled farther. The greater distance traveled indicates greater knowledge of the subject matter.
I know he's kidding, but all the more reason to ask: the guy's a bona fide professor? I have this feeling not everyone is finding this post funny.
Thanks to Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:20 PM
December 14, 2006
Tomorrow, Prickly Paradigm Press, about whom I've written for Ideas, will publish an excellent pamphlet by Danny Postel, a Chicago-based intellectual and political activist who I've known and admired for years.
"Reading 'Legitimation Crisis' in Tehran" asks why American progressives, human rights activists, and antiwar types seem so indifferent to the plight of Iranian progressives, who in the past year have suffered from a brutal crackdown -- by the Ahmadinejad government -- on dissident intellectuals and newspapers, trade unionists, student movement leaders, and human rights organizations. (A veteran of the Central America solidarity movement of the 1980s, Postel sees no similar efforts today with respect to Iran.)
The short answer, according to Postel, is that most American leftists view Iran through
the prism of American imperialism, which is no less an American prism for being critical, as opposed to uncritical, of US foreign policy.
By that, Postel means that American lefists are uncomfortable with the idea of being on the same side of a movement to reform or topple a foreign government as the Bush administration. Especially when it comes to Iran, where the CIA infamously toppled a government already. In Guatemala (or Indochina, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, or East Timor), by contrast, solidarity with the victims of military juntas was an extension of one's opposition to the US Empire.
What can western supporters of those fighting for democracy, feminism, pluralism, human rights, and freedom of expression in Iran do to help? Postel, who pointedly identifies himself in his pamphlet not as a leftist but a liberal, suggests that those of us whose solidarity is with all people struggling for liberation from oppression take inspiration not from Marxist, postcolonialist, and poststructuralist thinkers, but from liberal political philosophers like Jurgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper -- i.e., the heroes of American neocons.
UPDATE: After an email exchange with Postel, I retract these imprecise, misleading, and partially incorrect lines.
How to be a liberal who is not a neocon? Postel suggests that American have a lot to learn from Iranian intellectuals and activists who have rediscovered "radical liberalism" as a fighting faith, and that liberals need to roll up their sleeves and engage in the kind of solidarity politics that the US Left, to its credit, is known for.
There's much more to this slim pamphlet, including a fascinating interview with Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, who was arrested last year, and who (despite his maddeningly vague arguments in favor of a "soft univeralism" of human values) emerges as an extremely charismatic figure; and a close psychological reading of Michel Foucault's illiberal 1978-79 articles in support of the Iranian Revolution.
I read the pamphlet every morning before work last week, on the subway; couldn't put it down! Great stocking stuffer...
UPDATE: Scott McLemee weighs in on all this.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:58 PM
December 14, 2006
At The Economist blog called Free Exchange, well worth a regular read, a new post is perceptive about the scourge of "padded" books -- that is, books that should really be long articles. The problem at the root of this phenomenon, says the writer, is psychological. It's about what economists call "sunk costs." A recognition that you have spent a lot of money on a renovation to your house leads you, logically or not (that part's debatable), to spend a bunch more making it "perfect" (as if such a thing were possible). Spending leads to spending. This is most visible, as the Economist blogger says, at casinos. "Well I'm down $200 -- can't stop now."
In the case of authors, they sink a lot of time (the freelancer's currency) into an article that naturally ends up leaving out much of the research and even writing that they put into the project. A book, then! But of course, much more effort is required to make a well-constructed book-length piece of writing. Which means either that (usually) the writer drains herself pouring time into a book that readers of the article pass over or, and this is more common among big shots, she doesn't put in the required extra effort and risks a skewering in the reviews. The answer, I suppose, is restraint; maybe agents contribute to a thirst for something more?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:07 PM
December 14, 2006
Speaking of "Brainiac's treatment" of Alex Beam, the Globe columnist, let me explain: Last week, I noted that the Web site IvyGate, co-edited by Beam's son, Chris was "whining" that Beam had "pilfered" (my words) a story idea about Felicia Nimue Ackerman, a Brown professor.
IvyGate did, in fact, complain ...but it was a complaint with a higher irony quotient than I realized. As this New York Observer piece explains, Alex Beam had the idea to write about Ackerman first. Then he casually mentioned the idea to Chris Beam, who wrote about it first, on IvyGate. So, to be clear, there was no "pilfering" involved.
I presented the whole pseudo-dispute as a joke, but I did also leave a misleading impression.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 12:00 PM
December 14, 2006
Speaking of Second Life intellectual-celebrity appearances, as John did yesterday, Fri. night from 9p to 11p (prime computer-addict hours?), the virtual community/universe will play host to the fourth anniversary party of Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to freeing the world, and particularly the Internet, from the bonds of an antiquated concept known as copyright.
Among the appearances: Lawrence Lessig, author of "Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity," which he made available free online, and a prominent enemy of copyright lawsuits; Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, the creator and presiding guru of Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopedia on which no one can protect or profit from their work; and Joi Ito, a longtime Internet hand who wandered around in his post-collegiate years (that's funny, me too!) but now is a bigwig techie at Technorati, as well as a big investor, having sold his heavily venture-capitalized startup for gobs a few years ago. (Weren't those the days?)
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:38 AM
December 14, 2006
Globe columnist Alex Beam -- his office is right across from mine; last week, he busted my chops about Brainiac's treatment of him -- published his annual satirical family newsletter, detailing the antics of the fictional Joye family, in yesterday's paper.
With real end-of-the-year missives, you're forced to read between the lines to get the whole story; Alex does it for us:
You know our son, little Jon-Jon, and how he likes to follow in his Dad's footsteps! He's plunged into the fast-growing "offset" trading business for people like Al Gore who want to lead "carbon neutral" lifestyles. Every time you consume energy generated by bad old fossil fuels, Jon-Jon will find you an offsetting investment in renewable energy, like wind or solar power. Now I'm glad we planted him in front of "Captain Planet" when he was a baby.
(There's gilt in guilt all right. J-J is piling up investments from families ashamed of piloting their six-ton Lexus SUVs around America's national parks. The money goes right into his pocket, of course, but he provides extensive "documentation" for customers eager to sound off about their wind farm investments in some woebegone corner of the US, like West Dakota.)
This year, for the first time, Alex exhumed all of his previous Joye letters and made them available online. Here are the links:
2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 -- the year irony died | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | 1997 | 1996 -- not sure what happened | 1995 | 1994 | 1993
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:45 AM
December 13, 2006
Richard Posner gave a lecture today -- in Second Life. Details, and a pointer to a transcript, here.
Posted by John Swansburg at 08:03 PM
December 13, 2006
At The Volokh Conspiracy, David E. Bernstein, a professor at the George Mason law school who has been published by the libertarian Cato Institute, points to an important piece of long-form team reporting from Sunday's Washington Post.
The article is about a successful large-scale lobbying effort by the dairy industry, which managed to block a small milk producer from undercutting the competition by around 20 cents a gallon -- no small amount, as experience at the gas pump will tell you -- largely by bottling his own milk. As Bernstein points out, the piece raises two issues, which cut in opposite directions politically. One, which Bernstein highlights, is that the free market is sometimes squelched by anti-competitive legislation -- by a government that tends to be viewed by liberals, says Bernstein, as a consistent source of good works.
The other matter, more likely to be embraced by liberals themselves, is the enormous influence of lobbyists and the lasting need, despite McCain-Feingold, for campaign finance reform:
[The large dairy producer] Dean Foods reported spending almost $2.5 million, including $500,000 for outside lobbyists. One was Charles M. "Chip" English Jr. of Thelen Reid & Priest. English also represented Shamrock Foods, United Dairymen of Arizona and the Dairy Institute of California.
During 2005, English fine-tuned the language in the milk bill. "My hand can be seen throughout the bill," he said in an interview. Pick a paragraph in the legislation, he said, and "either I wrote it or I commented on it."
Some pride in that voice, huh? The Post's reporting uncovers the key legislative moment, in which a Democrat (another wrinkle) was the principal culprit.
[Sen. Harry] Reid made his move on Dec. 16 [of last year], with the Senate chamber nearly empty. He brought up the milk bill, which passed a few minutes later by "unanimous consent," a procedure that requires no debate or roll call vote if both political parties agree. Reid and [Republican Sen. Jon] Kyl said in recent statements that their goal was to level the playing field for milk producers.
The good sport award, by the way, goes to the small producer who got squashed: "'I still think this is a great country,' [Hein] Hettinga said. 'In Mexico, they would have just shot me.'"
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:08 PM
December 13, 2006
Regret the Error, a blog that "reports on corrections, retractions, clarifications and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in the media," offers today its best errors and corrections of '06. There are some pretty amazing examples of the form here, but my favorite has to be this one from the Chicago Tribune:
An editorial in Friday’s paper incorrectly stated that Florida Cresswell, a candidate for state representative in the 28th District, was convicted in 1999 of battery and stealing Tupperware. In fact he was convicted of stealing a battery from a van as well as Tupperware that was inside the van.
Via Romenesko.
Posted by John Swansburg at 01:46 PM
December 13, 2006
A while back I blogged about the Unsuggester, a feature of LibraryThing that will tell you, based on a book you own, what other books you are least likely to own.
Now John Emerson, at the pleasingly low-tech blog Idiocentrism ("Your best source of bulk discursive charity"), has tested out some interesting books to find out their anti-books. The funniest pairing: "Chicken Soup for the Soul," by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, is the anti-book of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," by Hunter S. Thompson. One surprise for me: those who own the popular Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon Days" just don't take to the wildly popular J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter Box Set." Maybe it's the differing age demo? The Valve points to Emerson's post and sparks a lively comments section. John Emerson again, in the comments section: "'Sisterhood of the travelling pants' is the opposite of almost everything."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:08 PM
December 13, 2006
In a new post on The Economist blog, Free exchange, the anonymous writer takes issue with Gwyneth Paltrow's alleged statement (she denies it) that the English are "much more intelligent and civilized then the Americans" and that "people [in England] don't about work and money; they talk about interesting things at dinner." (The blogger also notices that the New York Times more or less took Paltrow's side, citing the English accent as key.)
The Economist thinks Paltrow was just snowed by fresh faces who haven't yet trotted out the same stories. More seriously, though, they note that in fact Americans have more schooling:
An American partisan might even note that finding a well-educated dinner companion may actually be easier in the US. Until recently, only a small minority in most Western European nations received any post secondary education, even though tuition was low or free in most places.
The culprit across the pond seems to be the relative paucity and poverty of universities, who would be better off if they could charge tuition, if only that proposal didn't always spark mass student demonstrations.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:12 AM
December 12, 2006
A story by Neela Banerjee in today's Times takes a look at the plight of gay evangelicals:
Gay evangelicals seem to have few paths carved out for them: they can leave religion behind; they can turn to theologically liberal congregations that often differ from the tradition they grew up in; or they can enter programs to try to change their behavior, even their orientation, through prayer and support.
A few months ago, Ideas took a close look at the last of these options in a piece by Tanya Erzen, a professor at Ohio State who wrote a study of "ex-gay" ministries after a year of living and doing field work at New Hope Ministry in California.
As Banerjee notes in the Times, perhaps the most difficult aspect of being a gay evangelical is finding a community that will accept you. "They are too Christian for many gay people, with the evangelical rock they listen to and their talk of loving God," she writes, but too gay for most evangelical congregations.
Tanya Erzen made a similar observation, and found that this profound sense of alienation explains, in part, the appeal of the ex-gay movement. While many gay believers first go to ex-gay ministries hoping they can change their sexuality, the reason many stay is because "places like New Hope can offer the first experience they have ever had of belonging to a community and being open about their struggles."
Posted by John Swansburg at 06:15 PM
December 12, 2006
In a post on his economics and international relations blog, Daniel Drezner gets interested in a Jonathan Alter Newsweek piece about the 2008 potential presidential contenders. One quote about Barack Obama grabs his attention:
"After seven years of the 'we kick a--, go it alone' foreign-policy response to 9/11, the American voter will be ready to try a leader who projects better on the world stage," says Jeh Johnson, a corporate attorney and former general counsel of the Air Force under Clinton. "Barack's multicultural heritage will represent that change."
Is that really true, wonders Drezner? He takes a glance around the globe, and, "without naming names," sees a certain amount of racism lingering on a few continents. A couple of commenters on the blog mention China, but where Drezner may be on target is Western Europe, which has been coping with African immigration and where apparent xenophobes like France's Jean-Marie Le Pen have gained political traction.
Of course, the larger question is whether America itself is ready for a black president.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:32 PM
December 12, 2006
Coverage of the death of General Augusto Pinochet, the former ruler of Chile, has generally emphasized his role in an anti-democratic coup, his murder of dissidents, and his personal corruption.
In these three pieces -- a new symposium and two "flashbacks" (here and here)-- the National Review offers more-sympathetic views, ranging from the claim that Pinochet was an anti-Communist hero, who has been falsely maligned by leftists and "academics," to the assertion that he was both hero and tyrant.
(Actually, those pieces only scratch the surface of NR's discussions of Pinochet, I now see. Here's a reprinted pro-Pinochet column from 1978 by William F. Buckley, for example.)
Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:27 PM
December 12, 2006
We at Brainiac strive not to ridicule, but this link is worth posting just for the humor value. I don't need to comment here, only to give a taste of what's in store at WorldNetDaily, an organ that calls for a healthy dose of skepticism, it would appear. Jim Rutz, chairman of Megashift Ministries and founder-chairman of Open Church Ministries, has penned an all-out assault on, uh, soy. This vegetarian favorite is weakening the manhood of our nation's children, he says:
Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That's why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!)
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:40 PM
December 12, 2006
In the second issue of Situations, a journal published by the CUNY Graduate Center that "addresses the lapse of the radical imagination in both left theory and in popular consciousness," we have a fine essay from the late, much-lamented critic, writer, and professor Ellen Willis.
Willis has shown great range in her career; she wrote a profile of Bob Dylan early on for The New Yorker, and here she has written a left-wing complaint about Thomas Frank, author of the highly influential lefty book "What's the Matter with Kansas." What Frank misses in his critique of the misguided rural Republican voter who votes contrary to his best economic interests, says Willis, is that the social/culture-wars issues that Frank thinks are mere GOP bait-and-switch devices are in fact very much alive among rural voters, if not among the upper-middle folk that Frank probably consorts with most often. Tell the young girl who needs both parental consent and an illegal trip across state lines to get an abortion that the social issues are a mere phantom.
The examples like that one that Willis brings to bear are impressive in quality and quantity.
[Updated 1:11 p.m.]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:40 AM
December 11, 2006
Richard Epstein's Ideas piece on the pharmaceutical industry occasioned many letters to the editor, several of which were published in yesterday's Globe. Read them here.
Posted by John Swansburg at 05:25 PM
December 11, 2006
Mark Feeney, who is running away with the 2006 Brainiac Sixth Man Award, wrote this morning to bring my attention to what seems like a rather fascinating undertaking: The Johns Hopkins University Press is publishing the complete prose of T.S. Eliot. Says JHU:
The project will be developed under the editorial direction of Ronald Schuchard, the renowned Eliot scholar and professor at Emory University, and co-published with Faber and Faber, the literary publisher founded by Eliot in the 1920s.
What's so special about this? Well, according to Schuchard, only about 10 percent of Eliot's prose has ever been published.
I confess to not having read much of Eliot's prose, though I have dipped into his Shakespeare criticism a bit (he famously thinks very little of Hamlet). This promises to be an important volume, though I'm not sure it will supplant my favorite Eliot book, the facsimile edition of the Wasteland, in which you can look over the shoulder of "il miglior fabbro," Ezra Pound, as he scratches out his edit of Eliot's draft (working title: "He Do the Police in Different Voices").
Posted by John Swansburg at 04:40 PM
December 11, 2006
In the new Los Angeles Times Book Review, an appreciation of the New York Review Books series of classics in reprint. Disclosure: like the author of the piece, I'm a friend of the editor of the series, and worked at the magazine arm of the NYRB. (It's worth noting, too, that NYR Books publishes original titles, too, including collections of work from the magazine.)
I must add, discounting for bias, that this is indeed a great series, and one that has been able to carve itself a niche that keeps it more than alive. Low cost helps; many of the books are either in the public domain or have rights that are inexpensive to obtain.
I've read "English, August," too, and was delighted to discover that there exists an Indian slacker novel that incorporates elements of Kafka- or Bartleby-like workplace frustrations. The LAT reviewer has very cleverly nicknamed the book "Bright Heat, Big Dust." "Cassandra at the Wedding" is on the waiting-to-be-read stack, as are other books in the series. Ah, the brick-like "Anatomy of Melancholy": some day.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:12 PM
December 11, 2006
This from the (London) Independent, about a new report by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation: "Meet the world's top destroyer of the environment. It is not the car, or the plane, or even George Bush: it is the cow." According to the 400-page report, "Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together." I'd heard about the impact of methane emissions from cow manure and flatulence [chuckle], but I had no idea about the carbon output, nor the scale we are talking about. (Also, I hadn't known that methane is far more dangerous than carbon. Al Gore didn't mention that one in "An Inconvenient Truth.") What is more, the harm done by livestock will more than double by 2050, as meat demand increases.
Here we are devoting vast amounts of energy and ink and political debate to alternate sources of fuel to drive our automobiles and planes, while I haven't heard a word about What To Do About the Cows -- a bigger worry, it would appear. Are there any ideas even on the table, aside from a vast sea change toward vegetarianism?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:49 AM
December 11, 2006
The Web site of the American Prospect has published an intriguing article about what the Creationists are planning next after significant losses in the courts. The piece, by Sahotra Sarkar, a professor of biology, geography, and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, points to the publication of a landmark book among intelligent design proponents. "The Privileged Planet" (2004) and its accompanying documentary were the work of Guillermo Gonzales and Jay Richards from the Discovery Institute, and they contend that the physics of earth seem to be carefully arranged to allow the possibility of life forms able to investigate the universe itself, i.e. us:
According to Gonzales and Richards, conditions on Earth have been carefully optimized for scientific investigation in such a way that it is "a signal revealing a universe so skillfully created for life and discovery that it seems to whisper of an extraterrestrial intelligence immeasurably more vast, more ancient, and more magnificent than anything we've been willing to expect to imagine." The evidence for creation, in other words, now comes from physics, not biology.
This is a clever maneuver by creationism, for in a sense it uses pure science, the enemy, as evidence. But it seems vulnerable to me to a big-picture objection: physics could have given rise to a planet in an infinite number of ways, and any one of them could have provided -- randomly -- for the creation of some form of life, for who's to say that in these alternate scenarios the conditions for life wouldn't be different? Perhaps another world would have allowed the possibility, for instance, of free-floating minds, without bodies. If these minds were capable of investigation into the universe, moreover, I don't see how that "whispers of" anything. After all, our minds haven't been able to prove the existence of a creator, no matter how hard we try.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:04 AM
December 10, 2006
The annual New York Times Magazine "Year in Ideas" issue is always terrific, and this year's edition, out today, is no exception. Some of my favorites from the '06 batch:
Digital Maoism
The Drivable One-Man Blimp
The Gyroball
The Hidden-Fee Economy
The Myth of "the Southern Strategy"
Paternity Confidence
Great stuff!
Posted by John Swansburg at 04:28 PM
December 8, 2006
Scrambling to put Sunday's section to bed, but wanted to echo Ty Burr's advice to take the rare opportunity to see Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole at the Harvard Film Archive tomorrow night. Notes Ty:
It may be Wilder's single most cynical movie -- and that's saying something -- with an unforgettable performance by Kirk Douglas as a weasel reporter. The movie's never been on video or DVD and is thereby something of a legend, so this is a rare chance to see it. As the old New York Times TV listings used to say: Pounce.
Couldn't agree more. I was actually able to track the movie down on video several years ago, at one of the best video stores in the country, but it is exceedingly hard to find. And as Ty says, withering in its cynicism.
It's prescient too. Douglas's weasel reporter orchestrates a media circus around a man who gets trapped inside a New Mexico cave. That circus, viewed today, feels like a way-ahead-of-its-time critique of what Frank Rich has dubbed the Mediathon -- that is, a story that isn't so much covered as created (and perpetuated) by media outlets starved for something that will sell.
The movie also features a newspaper editor who is so punctilious that he wears a belt and suspenders -- a classic Wilder touch.
The film is being shown as part of a centennial program at the Archive, one that will likely appeal more to the Wilder devotee than the novice -- there's no Double Indemnity, no Some Like It Hot, no The Apartment, no Sunset Boulevard.
But you needn't be steeped in Wilder's work to appreciate some of his lesser-known movies, and there are two real gems playing later next week. Kiss Me Stupid (a horny Dean Martin gets marooned in the small town of Climax, Nevada) and One, Two, Three (James Cagney tries to sell Coca Cola to the Soviets in East Berlin) are both hilarious farces, and two of my favorite Wilder pictures.
Posted by John Swansburg at 04:21 PM
December 8, 2006
For those fond of tales of corporate excess followed by hubris punished -- guilty as charged -- I highly recommend John Lanchester's piece about a new, somewhat salacious book about the erstwhile media baron Conrad Black and his troubled wife in the new London Review. The book is "Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge" (long ago published here). Lanchester tsk tsks the author, Tom Bower, for his evident delight in exposing and lambasting the fallen king, but he has some of his own animus to air:
The arc of Black’s story, however, is close to tragic, or it would be, if Black wasn’t quite such a bully and blowhard.
Lanchester also notes Black's use of leveraging to control newspapers in his early (and late) career. He would gain $X million in shares and establish control over an $X billion public company. This was in essence illegal in England, he writes -- news to me.
(That kind of company structure, in which a minority share has control of the voting rights, is not legal for a public company in this country. This is one of the reasons Black was later to float his business interests in the US. Common sense would point out that this is a flawed system, though as Bower says, it’s not a criticism you’ll find being levelled in the New York Times or Washington Post, both of which have similar structures.)
Ooh, clean hit. In fact, Lanchester's closing observation is that in ignoring the fundamental basis of capitalism -- that is, using capital instead of borrowed and imaginary figures -- was paradoxically Black's whole game.
As a parenthetical, Lanchester has interesting things to say in part because he worked for years at the Daily Telegraph, Black's first major newspaper holding. Interesting to learn that Black was regarded of something of a loudmouth but a fine owner nonetheless. However...
The great exception to that was [Black's wife] Barbara Amiel’s terrible column on the op-ed page, any mention of which would cause Telegraph staffers to clutch their heads and groan in unsimulated pain.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:20 PM
December 8, 2006
In the new issue of the Times Literary Supplement, we have a review of a Yale University Press book called Worst of Evils: The Fight Against Pain. The TLS piece, by Druin Burch, a physician and a teacher at the University of Oxford, tends toward the technical:
There is nothing in the electrical depolarization itself that can clue the brain in to understanding something about the modality of sensation: that depends on labelled-line coding.
Right. But Burch works his way around to interesting observations and conclusions, namely, and repeatedly, that "pain, like beauty, really is all in the mind." Or, in a James Thurber quote he borrows, "to call something psychosomatic ... is like referring to a female wife."
In fact, Burch, surprisingly for a physician, writes, "Philosophy, economics and art can have more impact on mental hurt than pills -- and more on physical health, too, when it comes to it."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:14 PM
December 8, 2006
At the Web site of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, Will Wilkinson pens an interesting Op-Ed style piece in response to a proposal by a Yale economist. Shiller argued, in a Library of Congress talk and paper (also blogged about and linked by Harvard economist Greg Mankiw) that "the IRS should be instructed to automatically adjust tax rates to keep economic inequality from getting worse."
Wilkinson argues that economic inequality is not ipso facto a "serious problem," as Shiller contends. Imagine we all start at the same starting line as a society. The functions of the market are set in motion. Some get richer, some poorer. More time passes, and perhaps the gap widens. So what's the problem? Maybe the society with the wider gap has a slightly higher expected income for each citizen; might not some choose that scenario?
Ezra Klein says "inequality is symptomatic of bad things, like an economy where the rich-gets-richer effect has accelerated, social mobility has declined, and the median worker has lost bargaining power and thus compensation. These may not be economic bad things, but they can be contrary to the way we believe our society should work."
Nevertheless, Klein is simply stating a position Wilkinson rejects, i.e. he's begging the question. Wilkinson's is an interesting challenge to Shiller, though not a wholly original one, and I hope we'll see a reply.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:29 PM
December 8, 2006
Last week, in a Brainiac post inspired by the news that George Trow had died, I expressed qualified admiration for Trow's famous essay, "Within the Context of No Context." I called it a fine piece of writing and thinking, but also said that I find it exasperating and, in some places, misguided.
My colleague Mark Feeney has also weighed in on Trow, in the pages of the New York Observer. Both an accomplished obit-writer and a brilliant close reader of photographs, Feeney puts his finger on what we might call the Trow Problem: One wants to admire Trow for his writing style and dead-on criticism of American culture, but one also can't help feeling that he's just a grown-up rich kid nostalgic for lost class privileges. Feeny notes that in an early author photo, Trow is "grinning, blond, suffused with a wholly unaffected preppie enthusiasm," while in a later photo, his "boyish charm has given way to a well-muscled wariness." Is there a disappointed preppie lurking inside Trow's muscular criticism of the way we live now? That's not what Feeney writes, mind you -- I don't want to put words in his mouth -- but it's what I ask myself, more or less, when I read "No Context."
In an essay in today's Slate, Stephen Metcalf also expresses qualified admiration for Trow and "No Context," but at much greater length, and in finer detail, than I did. Metcalf identifies himself as a "vulgar Trovian," and concludes by calling Trow his "principal literary hero," but he also gets off a number of great critical comments like this one:
Like many jeremiads, "Within the Context of No Context" is a cost-benefit analysis in which the benefits have conveniently been left out. Trow finally failed to make the tougher case: that the right to a childhood of one's own, and thus to a moral and aesthetic compass with which to reject the hustler's come-on, fully transcends the circumstances of one's birth.
Both essays are worth a read.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:11 AM
December 8, 2006
A reader we'll call L. dropped us a line yesterday, in response to a Brainiac post -- which accounted for nearly 1 percent of all traffic to Boston.com yesterday, thanks to a link from the blog Boing Boing -- about a mural in Boston's new ICA.
In the post, I'd wondered whether Chiho Aoshima's mural, which depicts a genie sitting atop what can only be called a fart cloud, might prove off-putting to Bostonians. Over to you, L.
When I moved to Boston from NYC two years ago, I shared your view that "Bostonian museumgoers... by all accounts are a stuffy lot." During these short two years I have discovered that may be a valid stereotype to some degree. However, I have been pleasantly surprised by a vibrant art community in Boston. I say "community" instead of "art world" -- the term commonly used to refer to NYC -- because there is a more friendly and accessible element to the art community of Boston -- precisely because it is not New York. And, I believe that this atmosphere in Boston actually allows artists to develop their work -- not just be "discovered" at a young age and turned into a Hollywood-style star overnight. The new ICA, I think, will only nurture the Boston arts community, by bringing shows of international contemporary artists to Boston, without the New York attitude -- very refreshing and enlightening!
As a lifelong Bostonian paralyzed with jealousy toward New York, that's music to my ears. Hope you're right, L., and thanks!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:33 AM
December 8, 2006
Patrick Keefe, author of Chatter and an Ideas contributor, has an insightful review of Sudhir Venkatesh's Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor over at Slate. Ideas adapted Venkatesh's book back in November, but one element of his story we unforunately didn't have space for was a fuller description of how he conducted his rather remarkable field work in a poor neighborhood of Chicago's South Side, which Keefe explains in some detail. Well worth a look.
Posted by John Swansburg at 10:24 AM
December 7, 2006
I nominate Lower Allston.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 05:36 PM
December 7, 2006
The enormously popular doodad-obsessed blog Engadget reports some news that ought to be reverberating far beyond the tech community. (Actually Slashdot got there first.) Scientists at Boeing-Spectrolab have just succeeded in building a solar cell that achieves an incredible 40.7 percent efficiency, reportedly double the efficiency rating of the nearest competitor. (A decent explanation of the breakthrough is available here.)
I seem to be on an environmental kick at Brainiac, but this is big news. It is a commonplace that wind and solar power are something of a fool's errand, a drop in the bucket of global (or even national) energy needs. But according to Slashdot's math, a solar panel at this efficiency would have to be (merely!) 265 miles square to supply all the power needed by the world. That's never going to happen, but a solar panel farm (like a wind farm) suddenly becomes a legitimate source of energy, rather than a lark for crunchy people. I nominate Siberia for a big one.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:28 PM
December 7, 2006
Every now and then, it's really worth making a visit to Overlawyered, the blog dedicated to "chronicling the high cost of our legal system." It's one stop shopping for the latest in absurd litigation.
A visit this morning, for instance, turned up word of a suit brought by a woman against Kraft Foods. Seems she bought some Kraft Dips Guacamole, felt "it just didn't taste that avocadoey," looked at the label, and realized that the product contains less than 2 percent avocados.
Now, this may be an affront to guacamole purists everywhere, but is it worth a lawsuit asking Los Angeles County Superior Court to stop Kraft from marketing the dip as guacamole -- and seeking unspecified punitive damages? As the LA Times reports, the FDA doesn't mandate how much avocado should be in guacamole (though the law does say that peanut butter must be 90 percent peanuts -- didn't realize that).
Maybe if California's avocado growers were bringing the suit I'd feel more sympathetic. Still, the whole thing could perhaps have been avoided if Kraft had been a bit clearer about the nature of its product. Another recent Overlawyered post points to a fun widgit that allows you to create your own warning labels online. I tried it out with the guacamole story in mind:
By the way, the LA Times story on the guacamole controversy is really worth reading, if for no other reason than to check out the correction. Who knew this was so competitive a market?
Posted by John Swansburg at 01:01 PM
December 7, 2006
Ahh, British humor. The Surrey (England) Comet published an article on the pigeon overpopulation problem in the Kingston town square. According to the "town centre manager," Graham McNally, "At this moment in time, a specialist marksman will be used to shoot the pigeons. I can definitely say there will be no gassing and no poisoning. The cull will be carried out discreetly."
Now, a discreet program of death by sniper fire is an invitation to humor. That call did not go unanswered. So popular was the forum for reader response that it has now been shut down. (The English can also be no fun.) Nevertheless, many letters were preserved online for posterity.
One reader:
I'm horrified at the very idea anyone might want to harm these gentle creatures. I myself was raised by pigeons after being abandoned in Trafalgar Square as a young nipper.
Next reader:
I know what you mean, reader. I was raised by yaks but I'm sure the experience was similar.
Still another, slightly off topic:
Dear Margaret. As you can see I've finally mastered this email thing! Sue and John came to visit today, which was nice, and it was Sue who taught me how to use the email.
I could go on.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:49 PM
December 7, 2006
Here is a good illustration of the problem I have with economics and economists in the current political climate. It's an interview with David Card, a talented and prize-winning young economist at the University of California, Berkeley whose findings are said to be "at odds with conventional wisdom." Great, you think, a breath of fresh air in a musty field. But listen to this:
I think economists who objected to our work [on the negligible effects of raising the minimum wage] were upset by the thought that we were giving free rein to people who wanted to set wages everywhere at any possible level. And that wasn't at all the spirit of what we actually said. In fact, nowhere in the book or in other writing did I ever propose raising the minimum wage. I try to stay out of political arguments.
Now, I can understand not wanting to appear as though your research-driven work is being driven by a top-down agenda. That hurts your reputation. But I have to wonder a little why you'd want to be an economist if you were likely to have zero effect on economic policy. What's your goal? To have people nod their heads and say, "Hm, that's interesting"?
The late Milton Friedman wanted his theories to propagate into the world, and so did the other titans. Why avoid trying for that sort of stature? Otherwise your work is academic, in both senses.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:30 PM
December 7, 2006
There was another excellent thing about Dushko Petrovich's Ideas essay (mentioned in a post yesterday) about contemporary art museums and the sometimes lousy new works they commission. It was a cartoon illustration by Ward Sutton, based on the inspiration of Ideas art director Greg Klee. Check it out, by clicking on the link below -- it's too big to fit into this blog's frame.
View image
Isn't it great?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:46 AM
December 7, 2006
The editors of IvyGate, a witty blog about the Ivy League, have been whining (semi-ironically, natch) that they were the first to note that the Brown philosophy professor Felicia Nimue Ackerman writes lots and lots of (very good!) letters to the New York Times -- but both a Globe columnist and now the Brown Daily Herald have pilfered their brilliant story idea.
(In an Oedipal twist, the Globe columnist, Alex Beam, has a certain familial connection to IvyGate. In this New York Observer piece, the elder Beam eloquently conveys his respect for the upstart blog.)
Yeah, IvyGate, it stinks when you write a landmark, consequential story and then someone else sweeps in and claims all the journalistic glory, don't it?
Do check out the collection of pithy Ackerman letters that IvyGate posts. Click here and scroll down a few screens.
*See this clarification, added 12/14/06: Alex Beam did not pilfer, for the record.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 10:52 AM
December 6, 2006
A perceptive essay by the environmental writer Bill McKibben is reproduced here, by The Center for the New American Dream, which "helps Americans consume responsibly to protect the environment, enhance quality of life, and promote social justice." (Sorry, but good luck.)
Poor McKibben must get tired of writing the same warnings and encouragements year after year, but he's good enough at it that it isn't a chore for readers, even when he's gently hammering us for our ethical shortcomings. The essay, though written some years ago, is timely now that we swing into the holiday season. 19 shopping days left! I've been working on the family to reduce our consumption every Christmas for five years, but McKibben says it better.
The reason to change Christmas is not because it represents shameful excess in a world of poverty, though perhaps it does. The reason to change Christmas -- the reason it might be useful to change Christmas -- is because it might help us to get at some of the underlying discontent in our lives. Because it might help us see how to change every other day of the year, in ways that really would make our whole lives, and maybe our entire 365-days-a-year culture, healthier in the long run.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:28 PM
December 6, 2006
There's a special section in today's Globe dedicated to the Institute of Contemporary Art's new waterfront home, a fancy glass box -- with an 80-foot cantilever jutting towards Boston Harbor -- on Fan Pier. Full disclosure: As the web editor for Living/Arts, I played a very modest, mostly advisory role in the creation of a snazzy online version of the ICA section.
One thing you won't find in the Globe's online ICA section is a link to an excellent Ideas essay by painter and critic Dushko Petrovich, who back in September argued that the idea of a "contemporary museum" is, in certain important respects, a contradiction in terms. While a museum of non-contemporary art can build a collection of art that has stood the test of time, he pointed out, by exhibiting and purchasing -- sometimes even commissioning -- new work by living artists, a contemporary art museum becomes a player in the art market, driving up the "stock" of those artists. A side effect of the rush to build contemporary art museums (like Bilbao's Guggenheim, London's Tate Modern, and New York's MoMA), Petrovich adds, is this:
There simply isn't enough high quality work to fill the profusion of buildings. Even as artists tend towards cheaper and reproducible media like videos and digital photographs, it seems hard to fill the spaces. The effect on art seems, to put it plainly, bad.
Petrovich singles out for ridicule the Guggenheim's "Art of the Motorcycle" show, its exhibit of Armani suits, and the 43-foot-tall puppy made of 70,000 flowering plants that the Gugg commissioned from Jeff Koons. One would like to ask what he thinks of "The Divine Gas," a monumental mural commissioned for the lobby of Boston's new ICA.
Drawn by artist Chiho Aoshima and printed on adhesive vinyl, "Gas" was (one hears) originally titled "The Divine Fart," for reasons that become obvious when you give the artwork a close look. The ICA coyly shows only an innocuous detail of the mural on their website, but the Globe shot a 360-degree photo of the lobby; so you can take a peek for yourself.
Can't take the time to view the 360-degree photo? OK, here's a photo of the divine gas in media afflatus:
PS: Despite my snarky tone in this post, I actually think "Divine Gas" is gorgeous, and very funny too. But one wonders how it will go over with other Bostonian museumgoers, who by all accounts are a stuffy lot. As they step into Boston's first new art museum in nearly a century, will they mind having their faces farted in? Stay tuned.
UPDATE: To see Ward Sutton's great illustration for Petrovich's essay, click here.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 01:52 PM
December 6, 2006
Today's serving of spam included a salvo from the war-on-Christmas camp, an e-mailed book promo headlined WAR ON CHRISTMAS TEACHES OUR CHILDREN THAT CHRIST IS A FIVE-LETTER WORD.
Yes, those evil secular progressives "are teaching kids that Christianity = profanity." Scary, isn't it? But not so scary as teaching them that Christ, that's C-h-r-i-s-t, is a five-letter word. Even people who count on their fingers should be able to get up to six.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 01:15 PM
December 6, 2006
Seth Mnookin, author of Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top, keeps a blog on the Sox that's very much worth a bookmark. Today, he takes a stab at defending the signing of J.D. Drew, a deal that's landed with a thud in these parts. (As Mnookin notes, there was actually a petition circulating asking the Sox not to acquire Drew -- and over 3000 people signed it.)
Mnookin musters some strong numbers and some sound arguments about Drew's mental make-up, which is perhaps being somewhat falsely maligned by Sox fans with Renteria on the brain.
(True skeptics, however, might be more convinced by another series of observations by Mnookin: his recent Slate essay entitled Free Agency Follies: Why are baseball GMs making so many stupid deals?)
Hospitality is not always the strong suit of Boston fandom. But in an effort to get off on the right foot, I'd like to extend a hearty welcome to J.D. Drew, and what's more, to extend an invitation. The airwaves and baseball blogs are not always the best forums for the free exchange of ideas in this town. But here at Brainiac, we're committed to spirited yet balanced debate. So, Mr. Drew, if you'd like to respond to your critics, we'd be happy to post your thoughts on the Ideas blog: email us at brainiac@globe.com
Posted by John Swansburg at 12:39 PM
December 6, 2006
Hobbies make us all feel better. We can be more than one thing. An editor and a crocheter. A lawyer and a line dancer. Think how fun that cooking class was.
If you're feeling low, one site recommends you build a boat in your closet. I recommend you stay out of your closet if you're feeling sad, but that's just one man talking. In any case we're talking about an operational sailboat, big enough for a man, and the instructions are pretty detailed and well-expressed.
Also available on instructables.com, my new favorite site, is a primer on how to make your ipod headphones double as a phone headset such that one ear does each when the phone rings. You need basic soldering skills, naturally. And an Altoids tin.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:15 AM
December 5, 2006
Another December book I'd like to bring to your attention is... hold on, let me back up and introduce it properly.
I used to think I knew all about the (1934) creation, by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, of the comic-book superhero Superman. In the accounts I'd read as a kid, Siegel and Shuster were bespectacled nerds attracted to the swashbuckling exploits of silent screen star Douglas Fairbanks, pulp magazine adventurers like The Shadow and Doc Savage, and comic-strip heroes like Tarzan, Buck Rogers, and Flash Gordon.
So I was surprised to read, in the 1998 book "Superman: The Complete History," that both Siegel and Shuster had acknowledged the influence of another fictional character -- one who, despite being the first super-strong and invulnerable comic-strip character ever, was less macho than slapstick. In 1929, cartoonist E.C. Segar introduced a squinting, tattooed, pipe-smoking, bell-bottoms-wearing sailor named Popeye into his long-running "Thimble Theatre" strip.
This wasn't the animated Max Fleischer Popeye, who forever took punches from Bluto till he could open a can of spinach, but a shiftless blue-collar type whose only real skill was throwing punches and dodging hard work. Still, a young Siegel had considered Popeye's stunts "sensational," and comics aficionados agree that Segar was a terrific cartoonist. Now the rest of us can find out for ourselves.
This month, Fantagraphics will publish "Popeye Vol. 1: 'I Yam What I Yam,'" the first in projected six-volume series. It's an outsized, gorgeous volume that follows the adventures of Olive Oyl's brother Castor, a "Thimble Theatre" regular who in a September '28 strip discovers a "whiffle hen" that brings good luck. By January of '29, Castor has decided to sail with the hen to a gambling resort on Dice island, and hires the very first sailor he finds on the dock to get him there: Popeye. Adventure and hilarity ensue.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:06 PM
December 5, 2006
Very interesting post about Vladimir Nabokov over at The Valve, which has a cool tagline, I remind you: "the safety valve alone knows the worst truth about the engine" -- W. Empson. The author of the post, Amardeep Singh, is an assistant professor of Enligh at Lehigh, and, relevantly, author of a forthcoming book on "literary secularism."
Singh points out that a passage from Nabokov's memoir "Speak, Memory" seems to imply a belief in intelligent design, or anyway something "intelligent design-ish." After describing the mysterious workings of larvae, ants, and other creatures of nature, he writes, in typically well-turned prose:
"Natural Selection," in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of "the struggle for life" when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator's power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.
This is a variation on thoughts espoused by Annie Dillard in the marvelous opening essay from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a collection of essays and other short writings. The essay is about nothing less than the meaning of existence, and its basic theme is that we don't have the barest clue what we're doing here on the planet. A memorable image: we're rowing a skiff into total blackness, hoping to see some land.
As with Dillard's conclusions, I would take issue with Singh in his inference of an intelligent design-ish theory. Nabokov is simply grappling with the fundamental flaw in a purely scientific explanation of the world -- that we are still left with the problem of the "first cause," also called the "prime mover." So maybe evolution is what's happening. But what started this thing? And doesn't it seem like who started this thing is more the question? Why is there something rather than nothing? And, more to Nabokov's and Dillard's point, if there's no God, what's with all this gratuitous beauty?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:19 PM
December 5, 2006
In Sunday's Ideas section, University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein argued that pharmaceutical companies, usually considered to be financial juggernauts, are actually quite vulnerable, due to the massive front-end costs necessary to develop new drugs and the short window of patent exclusivity during which the companies need to make back their investment.
Loyal Ideas readers who woke up early yesterday to short Pfizer stock are celebrating today. The drug company's stock took an 11 percent dive yesterday, on news that it was scraping development of its cholesterol treatment torcetrapib due to deaths and other complications during trials of the drug. (One of Pfizer's big moneymakers is another cholesterol drug, Lipitor, which goes off patent around 2010.)
See also this Times editorial on the subject.
Posted by John Swansburg at 04:22 PM
December 5, 2006
Due in part to the Freedom of Information Act and other so-called sunshine laws, it has now been revealed that a new and unique weapon has been approved for use in Iraq or elsewhere by the Department of Defense, according to military documents. The name of this weapon, the Active Denial System, or ADS, has the unmistakable whiff of military euphemism.
The ADS achieves its effect by firing "a beam of millimeters waves, which are longer in wavelength than x-rays but shorter than microwaves -- 94 GHz (= 3 mm wavelength) compared to 2.45 GHz (= 12 cm wavelength) in a standard microwave oven." This means, apparently, that the target feels literally as if his face is melting, though in fact it is not. Speaking of euphemisms, "the beam produces what experimenters call the 'Goodbye effect,' or 'prompt and highly motivated escape behavior.'" In other words, it's unbearable.
According to the unsealed reports, some tests "involved alcohol [?], attack dogs and maze-like obstacle courses [to prevent escape?]." Um, OK.
[Revised 4:40 p.m.]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:01 PM
December 5, 2006
The Washington Post and other papers report today that NASA is planning to put a space station on the moon by 2020. This is bound to be expensive, but NASA's basically mum about the cost, though it has a lot of other things to say. (The moon station is supposed to be about the size of the Washington Mall, for instance.)
Nevertheless, this sounds like one of the better ideas for space exploration that I've heard in a while. The WaPo highlights the fact that the station could serve as an intermediate goal for the long dreamed-of mission to Mars, a NASA (and societal) Holy Grail. Enhancing the moon's value as a rest stop would be the fact that it would provide "hydrogen and oxygen mined from the lunar surface to make water and rocket fuel." Moon as filling station.
In a great 2004 essay [free!] in The New York Review of Books, Timothy Ferris lamented the fact that though NASA has recorded successes in remote exploration, manned flight has been a bust for years:
As [President] Bush noted, "In the past thirty years, no human being has set foot on another world, or ventured farther upward into space than 386 miles -- roughly the distance from Washington, D.C. to Boston, Massachusetts." It is as if sixteenth-century Spain, three decades after Columbus, lacked a single ship capable of venturing out of sight of land.
Ferris also talks about neat-o possibilities for space tourism to the moon, or at least to orbit. One of these:
the high cost of getting from the Earth to low orbit could be avoided by building a space elevator -- essentially a cable attached to the ground at the bottom and to a geosynchronous satellite at the top. The satellite would orbit at the same rate the Earth rotates (as do the communications satellites that feed rooftop TV dishes) so the cable would stay put. Electrical elevators would shuttle up and down the cable, carrying people and goods into orbit quickly and inexpensively.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:42 PM
December 5, 2006
When you're tired of the same old intuitive, impressive Web 2.0 applications that seem to know exactly what you want -- particularly the almost depressingly accurate Amazon.com recommendation engine -- here's an idea: a guide to unpredictability.
As reported by Slashdot and passed on by a reader, LibraryThing, a personal library cataloging site that also allows social social networking via comparing book collections, has created the Unsuggester, which tells you, for instance, that of the 849 customers who, like you, own David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, none of them own Heaven and Earth, by Nora Roberts, despite its popularity. (The results are ranked by the improbability of zero matches.)
So broaden your horizons. See how the other half reads.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:29 AM
December 5, 2006
John, I'm glad you asked. I was curious about the same question, last week, and found the following on the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens Web site:
As our name implies, there were more than a few people who knew Stevens and couldn't stand him. Readers of Peter Brazeau's oral biography, "Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered," will be interested in the memo Ivan Daugherty, an attorney who worked for Stevens, wrote to the file as record of his difficulties with his boss. This typescript chronicles incidents that occured on January 3, 1947, in the office, the Canoe Club and in the car, in which Stevens and Daugherty strongly disagree.
Here's the juicy memo.
The site also links to this column from the Hartford Courant, "Enemies of Wallace Stevens, Unite!" which appears to be entirely tongue in cheek. (The author laments how "complex" and "deep" and "subtle" Stevens is -- which is true -- and how he doesn't rhyme -- which is a libel. Consider this opening flourish: "Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / of tan with henna hackles, halt!")
Posted by Christopher Shea at 10:30 AM
December 4, 2006
...and anyone else who happens to find themselves in the vicinity of Hartford: While you wait to see what happens to Wallace Stevens's home, which Chris blogged about last week, you can experience perhaps just as important an aspect of his life in Hartford -- his walk to work.
Stevens, who never learned to drive, walked the two miles to and from his job at that insurance company each day, and an outfit calling itself the Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens* has produced a map of his route so visitors to the city can retrace his steps. This may seem rather mundane, but Stevens is said to have composed his poems in his head while making these walks. Makes you feel a little guilty for spending your commute listening to WEEI, doesn't it?
*Question for bigger Stevens fans than I: What's the joke here? There doesn't seem to be an enemy of Stevens to be found in this group. Surely this is a reference to the "Comedian as the Letter C" or somesuch, but I'm missing it...
Posted by John Swansburg at 06:22 PM
December 4, 2006
The Supreme Court today took up the issue of race in schools, hearing oral arguments in two cases involving school assignment plans that use race as a factor. Initial reports don't sound promising for supporters of such programs: Justice Kennedy, considered to be the swing vote in the cases, seemed skeptical of taking race into account in admissions, even if the goal is better integrated K-12 schools. According to Reuters:
"You're characterizing each student by reason of the color of his or her skin," Justice Anthony Kennedy told a lawyer for one of two school districts arguing before the high court.
"It seems to me that that should only be, if ever allowed, allowed as a last resort."
A few weeks ago in Ideas, Cara Feinberg wrote a preview of the cases argued before the Court today, examining the legal issues in play and looking at what the impact of the Court's decision might be locally.
The Lynn school district uses a very similar school assignment plan to the ones in Seattle and Louisville that are being challenged in the cases before the Court. Lynn's program survived a challenge that went all the way up to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court denied to hear that case last year -- but that was before the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor.
See also the analysis of today's arguments over at the always informative SCOTUSblog.
Posted by John Swansburg at 04:22 PM
December 4, 2006
Over at the prominent left-wing science blog Pharyngula (for the origin of the name, eat your heart out here), PZ Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris, posts on a Daily Telegraph news story concerning a debate about whether fossils in the collection of the National Museums of Kenya that seem to lend strong support to the theory of evolution should be emphasized or, in a sense, put in a corner:
The museum's collections include the most complete skeleton yet found of Homo erectus, the 1.7-million-year-old Turkana Boy unearthed by Leakey's team in 1984 near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.
The museum also holds bones from several specimens of Australopithecus anamensis, believed to be the first hominid to walk upright, four million years ago. Together the artifacts amount to the clearest record yet discovered of the origins of Homo sapiens.
Leaders of Kenya's Pentecostal congregation, with six million adherents, want the human fossils de-emphasized....
"Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory," the [head] bishop said.
I'm not sure how displaying fossils amounts to promoting a theory, but I suppose the concern is about how the fossils are described and given prominence by the museum. That's a valid point of criticism or argument, as the museum's directors acknowledge. Nevertheless, relegating an artifact to a position of insignificance in a museum, if that's what's being proposed here, seems a suspicious way to cope with a threat to one's belief system. Shouldn't the bishop insist that the description of the fossils acknowledge the controversy?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:04 PM
December 4, 2006
Last week I wrote here about a blind boy profiled by CBS News and People magazine who is able to navigate the world by clicking his tongue at a constant rate and locating objects around him using sonar. That is, Ben Underwood senses by the way that his clicking noises bounce back to him where objects are situated around him. The CBS footage I linked to is impressive. (The pillow-throwing fight! The fire hydrant!)
Now Slate has posted a follow-up story by an excellent journalist with a flair for science, Dan Engber, about just what the boy is able to do. One of Engber's interesting finds is that Underwood simply has an advanced version of a skill called echolocation that we all naturally have:
Go ahead and try out the skill you never knew you had. First, close your eyes and put on a blindfold, and then ask a friend to move a frying pan forward and backward in front of your face. Now start making noises—any noises you want. You can click your tongue like Sonar Boy, or you can whistle, or you can sing a scale. With a little bit of practice, you'll be able to tell when the pan is close to you and when it's not.
In one study decades ago, subjects using "self-generated noises to locate discs of various sizes and materials" were able to "even distinguish between discs covered in velvet and denim."
By the way, about that fire hydrant: how does Underwood know what a fire hydrant "looks like"? (He was two when his eyes were surgically removed.) I suppose that's an issue for every blind person, especially the congenitally blind, but it is a kind of brain teaser. It's partly answered by the sense of feel, of course, but to go from there to "seeing" it next to the sidewalk, as Uundwerwood does -- wow.
Engber also answers the obvious next question -- why don't we teach this to all the blind? -- by discovering that that very issue is the object of some controversy. Apparently most trainers of the blind feel that they would actually be better off, or safer anyway, using a cane. And that Underwood's ability to "see with sound" gives support to the idea, also controversial among the blind and their teachers, that blind people have better hearing. Those trainers will be sticking to the basics.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:54 PM
December 4, 2006
A remarkable German court decision has just been handed down in a case regarding Berlin's new main rail station, the Hauptbahnhof, which opened in May after a 13-year construction period. The court sided with the station's original architect, Meinhard von Gerkan, to rule that the German rail company Deutsche Bahn unlawfully violated the architect's intellectual property rights by substantially altering elements of his design.
Especially at issue in the suit was the design of the subterranean floor housing the train tracks themselves. Seeking to avoid the depressing, oppressive feel of, say, the Penn Station tracks, Gerkan designed the ceilings to be vaulted and to allow light and air to cascade through them. Deutsche Bahn decided, without telling Gerkan, to hire a different architect to design a simple (and no doubt less expensive) flat ceiling, which was then installed.
Now Deutsche Bahn, unless they can succeed on appeal, is stuck with the charge of redoing the subterranean floor, at a cost, they claim, of 40 million euros, not counting lost business.
I have no idea how German intellectual property law differs from ours, or even how ours handles architecture, but this seems a peculiar decision and precedent. It seems clear the company treated Gerkan badly, and perhaps breached their contract, but did they violate his intellectual property rights? It's not as though they stole his plans and credited someone else. And after all the architect is a hired hand...
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:57 AM
December 4, 2006
I was in the middle of doing some background reading for a more sage and serious post on the Supreme Court, which is taking up the issue of race in schools today, but then I came across this item and had to post it in the meantime. It's Yale law prof Jack Balkin playing a parlor game -- a new one to me -- in which the challenge is to compare the opinion writing styles of the Supreme Court justices to rock/pop stars. A sample:
David Souter-- Paul Simon. Bookish, a little too insular and self-contained. Still crazy after all these years.
Posted by John Swansburg at 11:50 AM
December 4, 2006
There are several promising-looking books coming out this month. I've been piling them up on my desk, and as I get a chance to look at them over the course of the next couple of weeks, I'll blog about them.
The top book on the pile is "Heidegger's Hut" (MIT), by architect and Cardiff University lecturer Adam Sharr. Heidegger's three-room mountain cabin, built in 1922 in the Black Forest, is iconic to 20th-century philosophy. Just as we think of Sartre at Les Deux Magots, we think of Heidegger writing "Being and Time" (1927) at his hut. In that book, Heidegger suggested that the age-old "question of Being" could only be answered by a certain type of philosopher, one who performs on himself a rigorous phenomenological exercise, an ascetic spiritual-intellectual effort to suspend ordinary consciousness until elusive Being is coaxed to "show itself from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself." By hiking off the grid to his hut, pumping water and chopping wood, one could argue that Heidegger was self-consciously advertising himself as a living model of such an ascetic philosopher. At any rate, the book made him internationally famous and inspired all subsequent existentialists. NB: T.W. Adorno's "Jargon of Authenticity" is a fantastic takedown of Heidegger and the German youth who admired him.
An excellent essay by Ian Hunter, a professor at the University of Queensland (Australia), in the Autumn 2006 issue of Critical Inquiry, argues that the only aspect of all the competing academic discourses we've come to call Theory is precisely that: a phenomenology-inspired "philosophical ascesis associated with the cultivation of a particular intellectual persona," as he put it. Like Heidegger, the likes of Derrida, Kristeva, Althusser, and their intellectual heirs have hinted at their own sage-like abilities to see through the illusions of everyday life into the chaotic, anarchic, elusive realm of Being, argues Hunter. He also claims that this explains their cult-like appeal to intellectuals.
Anyway, "Heidegger's Hut" seeks insights into Heidegger's thought via studying in extreme detail the hut's design and furnishings. It's illustrated with 53 photographs. Check it out.
PS: Being a confirmed urbanite, I've always found Heidegger's rustication less inspiring than the example set by Sartre -- who, according to a possibly apocryphal story, before he developed his version of existentialism was having a drink with Raymond Aron, who had just returned from Berlin, one day in 1933. Aron pointed to an apricot cocktail and said, "You see, my dear fellow, if you were a phenomenologist, you could talk about this cocktail and make a philosophy out of it." According to Simone de Beauvoir, who was there, Sartre "turned pale with emotion," immediately bought a book on Heidegger's mentor, Husserl, and began reading it as he walked home.
Why hike to a mountain hut in order to become a philosopher, when you can get the same bang for your buck at a Parisian cocktail bar?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:46 AM
December 3, 2006
In his Sept. 24 Ideas article, "Sex on the Brain," linguist Mark Liberman scrutinized the claims of some recent books -- like Louann Brizendine's "The Female Brain" -- that women talk more than men.
Not likely, he concluded, based on the actual science that's out there, and certainly not proven by anything in these authors' flimsy footnotes. For instance, Brizendine's sexy stat -- "A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000" -- was sourced to a self-help book that offered no evidence at all.
A bit of Googling easily turns up at least nine different versions of this claim, ranging from 50,000 vs. 25,000 down to 5,000 vs. 2,500. But a bit of deeper research reveals that none of the authors of these claims actually seems to have counted, and none cites anyone who seems to have counted either.
His dissent did nothing to slow the urban legend's spread, which Liberman has been grimly documenting at Language Log. Last week, however, the truth squad caught up with Brizendine, in the person of Guardian reporter Stephen Moss, who wrote in a Nov. 27 story that Brizendine
has accepted the criticism of the numbers . . . and will be deleting them from future editions. Nor will they appear in the UK edition, to be published by Bantam in April. "I understand Mark Liberman's point and I am grateful to him," she says. "He felt I was passing on data that was not nailed down, and thus perpetuating a myth."
So, the truth will out? Not so fast. The very next day, the Daily Mail reported the bogus Brizendine numbers as fact ("Women talk three times as much as men, says study"). That story hasn't been corrected, and people who tried to post objections told Liberman their comments have been ignored. (The published comments are all in the yahoo-humorous vein: "Someone had to do a study to figure this out?")
Liberman is reasonably philosophical about our collective weakness for any bunkum that confirms our gender stereotypes. But he wonders why journalistic standards so often don't apply to science reporting. Heads rolled at CBS after "Memogate," but ABC's credulous September reports on the neuroscience of sex were just fine: "No one at '20/20' is in even the slightest bit of trouble, although the sheer amount of fabricated evidence presented on those programs was a great deal larger," he writes.
In fact, the folks responsible for those "20/20" segments probably got praise and credit from their employers, since the pseudo-science of sex differences is a very popular topic, and those segments were effectively presented and presumably got good ratings. The same thing can be said about the dozens, if not hundreds, of editors, producers, pundits, reviewers and reporters who have spread the same fabrications through the global media over the past few months.
You know who you are, I want to add -- but then again, maybe you don't.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 09:27 PM
December 1, 2006
Someone -- I can only suspect Mark Feeney -- left a photocopy of George Trow's Harvard Class of 1965 "25th Anniversary Report" entry on my desk. One of the unexpected resources of the Globe's library is a semi-hidden bookshelf crammed with Harvard alumni reports.
Listing his occupation as "Writer, Actor," Trow writes just as engagingly and elliptically here as everywhere else. And -- instead of updating his classmates on the usual sort of thing one writes in these reports -- just he does in "No Context," Trow sounds an end-of-history note:
I do not care to write what people are not interested in reading -- and I believe that the intellectual tradition in this country has been put to rest. A scientist will understand what I mean when I assert that to reach a solution one must have not only a problem but a number of persons aware of the problem as something with attributes and a history. This is particularly true in the mathematics of language. Language experiments now take place in a near-vacuum and are nearly useless as a result.
There's no point in writing the sorts of thing that intellectuals formerly wrote about, because there's no one out there who'd read it, Trow seems to be saying. So what to do instead? He tells his classmates that he's decided to write screenplays. He'd already collaborated on writing a Merchant & Ivory film, in 1972: "Savages." After The New Yorker was sold to S.I. Newhouse, he says, he approached M&I again, "and I hope to be doing this kind of work for the rest of my life."
According to Trow's NYT obit, the only other screenplay he would collaborate on was M&I's "The Proprietor," in 1996. Perhaps Feeney, a great film expert and author of "Nixon at the Movies," will tell me more about this aspect of Trow's career...
Jeanne Moreau in "The Proprietor"
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:34 PM
December 1, 2006
My father, who still lives in Simsbury, Connecticut, where I grew up, recently alerted me to this story in the Hartford Courant: It's a proposal, by a professor of English at St. Joseph's College, in West Hartford, to turn the poet Wallace Stevens' home, in Hartford, into a cultural-tourism destination.
Stevens, a Harvard graduate who made his living as an insurance executive, is widely viewed as one of America's great 20th-century poets, sometimes even as the greatest -- yet he's little-known outside of academia. Dennis Barone writes that the
residence belongs to the Episcopal Diocese of Hartford. But imagine it as not just a historic house museum, but as a literary center for contemporary innovative writing and for the consideration of the interstices of 20th-century literature and culture.
It's a great idea, immediately seconded by one Stevens scholar. (The Stevens house would be a modernist counterpoint to the Mark Twain House.) Another Courant reader, however, writes in with a mild objection: Hey, that's my house you're talking about! (Click here and scroll to the second letter.) Yes, Barone probably should have mentioned that a family currently lives there.
Wallace Stevens's residence
Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:03 PM
December 1, 2006
Here's something brought to my attention by another one of my favorite people, photo historian and writer Luc Sante ("Low Life," "The Factory of Facts," "Evidence"). I've never met Luc face to face but we've emailed for years, written for the same publications, and shared tips on finding rare books by obscure Belgian cartoonists. Now he writes this:
I know Philosophywatch is on respite ... but I thought you might enjoy my favorite Brit blogger (Ian Penman)'s ruminations on this unexpected invocation of old S. K.
I followed the link and here's the deal. As he was watching TV coverage of the Pope's visit to Turkey, the other day, Penman noticed a Muslim protester holding a beautifully constructed placard that read, simply:
YOU SPIT ON TOMB OF JESUS
(S. Kierkegaard)
What does this mean? I did some searching and though I did not get an answer to my question, I discovered that the BBC's Mark Mardell wondered the same thing. Writing about the protesters in Turkey, he noted:
Other placards make more obscure points. "Have you read the Barnabas Bible?" takes a bit of working out. The said Bible turns out to be either a fake written in the 14th Century or the true gospel which predicts the coming of Muhammad, depending on your beliefs. But the one that has me truly baffled is apparently itself a quote: "'We spit on the tomb of Jesus' S Kikeerguard." None of those I speak to who are carrying the banner have even the slightest acquaintance with Danish existentialism or have a clue what the banner means. Can any one out there help decode?
Mardell's version of the placard text is different than Penman's, but whether this is because they saw different signs or one of them transcribed it incorrectly, I do not know. A number of BBC readers wrote to Mardell (follow link above, to read their letters) to offer explanations of what the placard might mean, but none could positively identify the origin of the quote. If the quote has an origin. Is this something that Kierkegaard wrote, somewhere? Is it a bit of media pranksterism on the part of anti-Pope Turkish Muslims? Or what?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:05 PM
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